Higgsed Chromo-Natural Inflation

Abstract

We demonstrate that Chromo-Natural Inflation can be made consistent with observational data if the SU(2) gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken. Working in the Stueckelberg limit, we show that isocurvature is negligible, and the resulting adiabatic fluctuations can match current observational constraints. Observable levels of chirally-polarized gravitational radiation ($r\sim 10^{-3}$) can be produced while the evolution of all background fields is sub-Planckian. The gravitational wave spectrum is amplified via linear mixing with the gauge field fluctuations, and its amplitude is not simply set by the Hubble rate during inflation. This allows observable gravitational waves to be produced for an inflationary energy scale below the GUT scale. The tilt of the resulting gravitational wave spectrum can be either blue or red.

34 +12 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (8)

• A Joint Analysis of BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck Data
• Inflation and the Scale Dependent Spectral Index: Prospects and Strategies
• Gauge-flation trajectories in Chromo-Natural Inflation
• Gravitational Waves and the Scale of Inflation
• Oscillating Chiral Tensor Spectrum from Axionic Inflation
• Chern-Simons EM-flation
• Cosmological consequences of classical flavor-space locked gauge field radiation
• Chiral Imprint of a Cosmic Gauge Field on Primordial Gravitational Waves

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Generation of gravitational waves from symmetry restoration during inflation
• de Sitter symmetries and inflationary correlators in parity violating scalar-vector models
• Tensor Adiabatic Modes and Consistency Relations with Primordial Axion-Gauge Fields