Inflationary buildup of a vector field condensate and its cosmological consequences

Understand

Light vector fields during inflation obtain a superhorizon perturbation spectrum when their conformal invariance is appropriately broken.

• Such perturbations, by means of some suitable mechanism (e.g.
• the vector curvaton mechanism), can contribute to the curvature perturbation in the Universe and produce characteristic signals, such as statistical anisotropy, on the microwave sky, most recently surveyed by the Planck satellite mission.
• The magnitude of such characteristic features crucially depends on the magnitude of the vector condensate generated during inflation.