TY - JOUR
T1 - Higgsed Gauge-flation
AU - Adshead, Peter
AU - Sfakianakis, Evangelos I.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Emanuela Dimastrogiovanni, Azadeh Maleknejad, Emil Martinec, Marco Peloso, and Mark Wyman for useful discussions. This work was supported by the United States Department of Energy through grant DE-SC0015655. EIS gratefully acknowledges support from a Fortner Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, The Author(s).
PY - 2017/8/1
Y1 - 2017/8/1
N2 - We study a variant of Gauge-flation where the gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken by a Higgs sector. We work in the Stueckelberg limit and demonstrate that the dynamics remain (catastrophically) unstable for cases where the gauge field masses satisfy γ < 2, where γ = g2ψ2/H2, g is the gauge coupling, ψ is the gauge field vacuum expectation value, and H is the Hubble rate. We compute the spectrum of density fluctuations and gravitational waves, and show that the model can produce observationally viable spectra. The background gauge field texture violates parity, resulting in a chiral gravitational wave spectrum. This arises due to an exponential enhancement of one polarization of the spin-2 fluctuation of the gauge field. Higgsed Gauge-flation can produce observable gravitational waves at inflationary energy scales well below the GUT scale.
AB - We study a variant of Gauge-flation where the gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken by a Higgs sector. We work in the Stueckelberg limit and demonstrate that the dynamics remain (catastrophically) unstable for cases where the gauge field masses satisfy γ < 2, where γ = g2ψ2/H2, g is the gauge coupling, ψ is the gauge field vacuum expectation value, and H is the Hubble rate. We compute the spectrum of density fluctuations and gravitational waves, and show that the model can produce observationally viable spectra. The background gauge field texture violates parity, resulting in a chiral gravitational wave spectrum. This arises due to an exponential enhancement of one polarization of the spin-2 fluctuation of the gauge field. Higgsed Gauge-flation can produce observable gravitational waves at inflationary energy scales well below the GUT scale.
KW - Cosmology of Theories beyond the SM
KW - Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85028728730&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85028728730&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/JHEP08(2017)130
DO - 10.1007/JHEP08(2017)130
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85028728730
VL - 2017
JO - Journal of High Energy Physics
JF - Journal of High Energy Physics
SN - 1126-6708
IS - 8
M1 - 130
ER -