A universal constraint on axion non-Abelian dynamics during inflation

Inflationary models equipped with Chern-Simons coupling between their axion and gauge sectors exhibit an array of interesting signals including a testable chiral gravitational wave spectrum. The energy injection in the gauge sector triggered by the rolling axion leads to a well-studied enhancement o...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Dimastrogiovanni, E., Fasiello, M., Michelotti, M., Özsoy, O.
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Recursos:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:digitalcsic_::7312edfe99040e71d0167f168dc10cfa
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/427291
https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-86000461139&doi=10.1088%2F1475-7516%2F2025%2F03%2F007&partnerID=40&md5=c1c2aa8afa4bf1022a32ff9674307420
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:cosmological perturbation theory
inflation
physics of the early universe
Descrição
Resumo:Inflationary models equipped with Chern-Simons coupling between their axion and gauge sectors exhibit an array of interesting signals including a testable chiral gravitational wave spectrum. The energy injection in the gauge sector triggered by the rolling axion leads to a well-studied enhancement of gauge field fluctuations. These may in turn affect observables such as the scalar and tensor spectra and also account for non-linear corrections to field propagators. In this work, we focus on non-Abelian gauge sectors. We show that gauge field self-interactions and axion-gauge field non-linear couplings significantly renormalize the gauge field mode function. Operating within the regime of validity of the perturbative treatment places strong constraints on the accessible parameter space of this class of models. We calculate corrections to the gauge field propagator that are universally present in these scenarios. Enforcing perturbativity on such propagators leads to bounds that are competitive with those stemming from analytical estimates on the onset of the strong backreaction regime. © 2025 The Author(s)