Scale-dependent chirality as a smoking gun for Abelian gauge fields during inflation
Axion-inflation models are a compelling candidate as a mechanism behind the accelerated expansion in the early universe in light of the possibility to embed them in higher dimensional UV complete theories and the exciting prospect of testing them with next-generation cosmological probes. Adding an A...
| Autores: | , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2024 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) |
| Repositorio: | DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:digital.csic.es:10261/383196 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/383196 https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85211241448&doi=10.1088%2f1475-7516%2f2024%2f12%2f008&partnerID=40&md5=09bf385795ca59c7f6ce9c4020d11d9a |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Inflation Physics of the early universe Primordial gravitational waves (theory) |
| Sumario: | Axion-inflation models are a compelling candidate as a mechanism behind the accelerated expansion in the early universe in light of the possibility to embed them in higher dimensional UV complete theories and the exciting prospect of testing them with next-generation cosmological probes. Adding an Abelian gauge sector to axion-inflation models makes for a rich, interesting, phenomenology spanning from primordial black holes to gravitational waves (GWs). Several recent studies employ an approximate analytic (Gaussian) template to characterize the effect of gauge field production on cosmological perturbations. In this work we go beyond such approximation and numerically study particle production and the ensuing scalar and tensor spectra. We find a significant deviation from results based on log-normally distributed vector field excitations. As an important phenomenological application of the improved method, we study the expected chirality and spectral index of the sourced GW background at scales relevant for current and next-generation GW detectors. One striking feature is that of a scale-dependent chirality. We derive a consistency relation between these two observables that can serve as an important tool in identifying key signatures of multi-field dynamics in axion inflation. © 2024 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab. All rights, including for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies, are reserved. |
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