Cosmological gravitational particle production of massive spin-2 particles

Understand

The phenomenon of cosmological gravitational particle production (CGPP) is expected to occur during the period of inflation and the transition into a hot big bang cosmology.

• Particles may be produced even if they only couple directly to gravity, and so CGPP provides a natural explanation for the origin of dark matter.
• In this work we study the gravitational production of massive spin-2 particles assuming two different couplings to matter.
• We evaluate the full system of mode equations, including the helicity-0 modes, and by solving them numerically we calculate the spectrum and abundance of massive spin-2 particles that results from inflation on a hilltop potential.