A mechanism for generating anisotropic enhancements of the curvature perturbation through a vector field is proposed. We find that when the mixing between the inflaton perturbation and the vector-field perturbation is sufficiently strong in the anisotropic inflation, the power spectrum becomes dominated by anisotropic constant modes. This suggests that statistical anisotropy in primordial black hole (PBH) formation may be inevitable if inflation undergoes an anisotropic inflationary phase. Our findings offer a novel approach to probe vector fields during inflation and to test the cosmic no-hair conjecture.

Close

PrevNext

View figure in article

• Gravitational wave sources
• Inflation
• Primordial black holes