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We investigate the anisotropics in the gravitational wave (GW) background produced at preheating after inflation. Using lattice field theory simulations of a massless preheating model, we show that the GW amplitude depends sensitively on the value of the decay product field x coupled to the inflaton s light during inflation. We find a strong anisotropy in the amplitude of the GW background on large angular scales, the details of which strongly depend on the reheating dynamics. We expect similar conclusions for a wide class of inflationary models with light scalar fields. If future direct detection GW experiments are capable of detecting the GW produced by preheating, they should also be able to detect this effect. This could eventually provide a powerful way to distinguish between different inflationary and preheating scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrate that any scaling source in the radiation era produces a background of gravitational waves with an exact scale-invariant power spectrum. Cosmic defects, created after a phase transition in the early universe, are such a scaling source. We emphasize that the result is independent of the topology of the cosmic defects, the order of phase transition, and the nature of the symmetry broken, global or gauged. As an example, using large-scale numerical simulations, we calculate the scale-invariant gravitational wave power spectrum generated by the dynamics of a global O(N) scalar theory. The result approaches the large N theoretical prediction as N-2, albeit with a large coefficient. The signal from global cosmic strings is 0(100) times larger than the large N prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider quantum diffusion in ultraslow-roll (USR) inflation. Using the ΔN formalism, we present the first stochastic calculation of the probability distribution P(R) of the curvature perturbation during USR. We capture the nonlinearity of the system, solving the coupled evolution of the coarse-grained background with random kicks from the short wavelength modes, simultaneously with the mode evolution around the stochastic background. This leads to a non-Markovian process from which we determine the highly non-Gaussian tail of P(R). Studying the production of primordial black holes in a viable model, we find that stochastic effects during USR increase their abundance by a factor of ~105 compared with the Gaussian approximation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]