Resonance instability of primordial gravitational waves during inflation in Chern-Simons gravity

Abstract

We investigate axion inflation where the gravitational Chern-Simons term is coupled to a periodic function of the inflaton. We find that tensor perturbations with different polarizations are amplified in different ways by the Chern-Simons coupling. Depending on the model parameters, the resonance amplification results in a parity-violating peak or a board plateau in the energy spectrum of gravitational waves, and the sharp cutoff in the infrared region constitutes a characteristic distinguishable from stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds produced by matter fields in Einstein gravity.

16 pages, 4 figures