Higgsed Gauge-flation

Peter Adshead, Evangelos I. Sfakianakis

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number130
JournalJournal of High Energy Physics
Volume2017
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 1 2017

Keywords

  • Cosmology of Theories beyond the SM
  • Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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