Anisotropic Inflation with Non-Abelian Gauge Kinetic Function

TL;DR

This paper explores anisotropic inflation driven by a non-abelian gauge field with a kinetic function, revealing novel anisotropy types, chaotic reheating dynamics, and implications for cosmological fluctuation predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a non-abelian gauge kinetic function in anisotropic inflation models, showing new anisotropy behaviors and analyzing chaotic dynamics during reheating.

Findings

Anisotropy can be prolate or oblate, unlike in abelian models.

Chaotic behavior occurs during reheating due to nonlinear gauge self-coupling.

Lyapunov exponent indicates chaos is uncorrelated with anisotropy.

Abstract

We study an anisotropic inflation model with a gauge kinetic function for a non-abelian gauge field. We find that, in contrast to abelian models, the anisotropy can be either a prolate or an oblate type, which could lead to a different prediction from abelian models for the statistical anisotropy in the power spectrum of cosmological fluctuations. During a reheating phase, we find chaotic behaviour of the non-abelian gauge field which is caused by the nonlinear self-coupling of the gauge field. We compute a Lyapunov exponent of the chaos which turns out to be uncorrelated with the anisotropy.