Double inflation

Abstract

The Zel'dovich spectrum of adiabatic density perturbations is a generic prediction of inflation. There is increasing evidence that when the spectrum is normalized by observational data on small scales, there is not enough power on large scales to account for the observed large-scale structure in the Universe. Decoupling the spectrum on large and small scales could solve this problem. As a means of decoupling the large and small scales we propose double inflation (i.e., two episodes of inflation). In this scenario the spectrum on large scales is determined by the first episode of inflation and those on small scales by a second episode of inflation. We present three models for such a scenario. By nearly saturating the large-angular-scale cosmic microwave anisotropy bound, we can easily account for the observed large-scale structure. We take the perturbations on small scales to be very large, delta\ensuremath{\rho}/\ensuremath{\rho}\ensuremath{\simeq}0.1--0.01, which results in the production of primordial black holes, early formation of structure, reionization of the Universe, and a rich array of astrophysical events. The \ensuremath{\Omega} problem is also addressed by our scenario. Allowing the density perturbations produced by the second episode of inflation to be large also lessens the fine-tuning required in the scalar potential and makes reheating much easier. We briefly speculate on the possibility that the second episode of inflation proceeds through the nucleation of bubbles, which today manifest themselves as empty bubbles whose surfaces are covered with galaxies.