High-energy effects on the spectrum of inflationary gravitational wave background in braneworld cosmology

Abstract

We discuss the cosmological evolution of the inflationary gravitational wave background (IGWB) in the Randall-Sundrum single-brane model. In the braneworld cosmology, in which three-dimensional space-like hypersurface that we live in is embedded in five-dimensional anti de Sitter (AdS_5) space-time, the evolution of gravitational wave (GW) modes is affected by the non-standard expansion of the universe and the excitation of the Kaluza-Klein modes (KK-modes), which are significant in the high-energy regime of the universe. We numerically evaluate these two effects by solving the evolution equation for GWs propagating through the AdS_5 space-time. Using a plausible initial condition from inflation, we find that the excitation of KK-modes can be characterized by a simple scaling relation above the critical frequency f_crit determined from the length scale of the fifth dimension \ell. The remarkable point is that this relation generally holds as long as the matter content of the universe is described by the perfect fluid with the EOS p=w\rho for 0\leq w\leq 1. The resultant scaling relation is translated into the energy spectrum of the IGWB as \Omega_GW\propto f^{(3w-1)/(3w+2)} for f>f_crit. This indicates that, in the radiation dominant case (w=1/3), the two high-energy effects accidentally compensate each other and the spectrum becomes almost the same as the one predicted in the four-dimensional theory, i.e., \Omega_GW\propto f^0.