Suppressing Super-Horizon Curvature Perturbations

We consider the possibility of suppressing superhorizon curvature perturbations after the end of the ordinary slow-roll inflationary stage. This is the opposite of the curvaton limit. We assume that large curvature perturbations are created by the inflaton and investigate to which extent they can be diluted or suppressed by a second very homogeneous field which starts to dominate the energy density of the universe shortly after the end of inflation. The suppression is non-trivial to achieve, but we demonstrate two examples where it works. The mechanism is shown to work if the decay rate of the second field has a certain time-dependence leading to an intrinsic non-adiabatic energy transfer or if the second field is an axion field with a very non-linear periodic potential leading to a non-vanishing intrinsic non-adiabatic pressure perturbation. This opens the possibility of having much larger inflaton perturbations created during inflation than normally allowed by the COBE bound. It relaxes the upper bound on the energy scale of inflation models with a small first slow-roll parameter epsilon. In particular it can be important for brane inflationary models where the string scale can now be up to two orders of magnitude larger than usually expected and near the GUT scale