Parity Violation of Gravitons in the CMB Bispectrum

TL;DR

This paper explores how parity violation in primordial gravitational waves can produce distinctive signals in the CMB bispectrum, with potential for observational detection and implications for high-energy physics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that parity-violating graviton non-Gaussianities generate unique CMB bispectrum signatures, even in exact de Sitter space, and estimates the energy scale of related higher derivative corrections.

Findings

Parity violation appears in the CMB bispectrum configurations with odd multipole sums.

The non-Gaussianity shape is similar to the equilateral type.

Estimated bounds on the energy scale of Weyl cubic terms are around 3 million GeV.

Abstract

We investigate the cosmic microwave background (CMB) bispectra of the intensity (temperature) and polarization modes induced by the graviton non-Gaussianities, which arise from the parity-conserving and parity-violating Weyl cubic terms with time-dependent coupling. By considering the time-dependent coupling, we find that even in the exact de Sitter space time, the parity violation still appears in the three-point function of the primordial gravitational waves and could become large. Through the estimation of the CMB bispectra, we demonstrate that the signals generated from the parity-conserving and parity-violating terms appear in completely different configurations of multipoles. For example, the parity-conserving non-Gaussianity induces the nonzero CMB temperature bispectrum in the configuration with $\sum_{n=1}^3 \ell_n = {\rm even}$ and, while due to the parity-violating non-Gaussianity, the CMB temperature bispectrum also appears for $\sum_{n=1}^3 \ell_n = {\rm odd}$. This signal is just good evidence of the parity violation in the non-Gaussianity of primordial gravitational waves. We find that the shape of this non-Gaussianity is similar to the so-called equilateral one and the amplitudes of these spectra at large scale are roughly estimated as $|b_{\ell \ell \ell}| \sim \ell^{-4} \times 3.2 \times 10^{-2} ({\rm GeV} / \Lambda)^2 (r / 0.1)^4$, where $\Lambda$ is an energy scale that sets the magnitude of the Weyl cubic terms (higher derivative corrections) and $r$ is a tensor-to-scalar ratio. Taking the limit for the nonlinearity parameter of the equilateral type as $f_{\rm NL}^{\rm eq} < 300$, we can obtain a bound as $\Lambda \gtrsim 3 \times 10^6 {\rm GeV}$, assuming $r=0.1$.