Thermal tachyacoustic cosmology

An intriguing possibility that can address pathologies in both early Universe cosmology (i.e. the horizon problem) and quantum gravity (i.e. nonrenormalizability), is that particles at very high energies and/or temperatures could propagate arbitrarily fast. A concrete realization of this possibility for the early Universe is the tachyacoustic (or speedy sound) cosmology, which could also produce a scale-invariant spectrum for scalar cosmological perturbations. Here, we study thermal tachyacoustic cosmology (TTC), i.e. this scenario with thermal initial conditions. We find that a phase transition in the early Universe, around the scale of the grand unified theory (GUT scale; Tau similar to 10(15) GeV), during which the speed of sound drops by 25 orders of magnitude within a Hubble time, can fit current CMB observations. We further discuss how production of primordial black holes constrains the cosmological acoustic history, while coupling TTC to Horava-Lifshitz gravity leads to a lower limit on the amplitude of tensor modes (r greater than or similar to 10(-3)), that are detectable by CMBpol (and might have already been seen by the BICEP-Keck Collaboration).