Chiral Gravitational Waves from Chiral Fermions

Abstract

We report on a new mechanism that leads to the generation of primordial chiral gravitational waves, and hence, the violation of the parity symmetry in the Universe. We show that nonperturbative production of fermions with a definite helicity is accompanied by the generation of chiral gravitational waves. This is a generic and model-independent phenomenon that can occur during inflation, reheating and radiation eras, and can leave imprints in the cosmic microwave background polarization and may be observed in future ground- and space-based interferometers. We also discuss a specific model where chiral gravitational waves are generated via the production of light chiral fermions during pseudoscalar inflation.

9 pages, 1 figure; comments and references added; the published version

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Gauge Field and Fermion Production during Axion Inflation
• Higgsed Chromo-Natural Inflation
• Phenomenology of fermion production during axion inflation
• Chiral effects in astrophysics and cosmology
• Propagation of the gravitational waves in a cosmological background
• Chiral Gravitational Waves and Baryon Superfluid Dark Matter
• Chiral instabilities & the onset of chiral turbulence in QED plasmas
• Gravitational waves from fermion production during axion inflation
• Generation of gravitational waves from symmetry restoration during inflation
• Chiral gravitational waves from thermalized neutrinos in the early Universe
• Fermionic one-particle states in curved spacetimes
• Large-scale messengers from arbitrary spin fields