Chiral Imprint of a Cosmic Gauge Field on Primordial Gravitational Waves

Abstract

A cosmological gauge field with isotropic stress-energy introduces parity violation into the behavior of gravitational waves. We show that a primordial spectrum of inflationary gravitational waves develops a preferred handedness, left- or right-circularly polarized, depending on the abundance and coupling of the gauge field during the radiation era. A modest abundance of the gauge field would induce parity-violating correlations of the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization patterns that could be detected by current and future experiments.

5 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Improved Calculation of the Primordial Gravitational Wave Spectrum in the Standard Model
• Anomalous CMB polarization and gravitational chirality

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Higgsed Chromo-Natural Inflation
• Polarized primordial gravitational waves in the ghost-free parity-violating gravity
• Parity violation in the CMB trispectrum from the scalar sector
• Gravitational Wave -- Gauge Field Dynamics
• Dark Energy with a Triplet of Classical U(1) Fields