# Higgsed Gauge-flation

## TL;DR

This paper investigates a Higgsed version of Gauge-flation, analyzing its stability, fluctuation spectra, and potential to generate observable chiral gravitational waves at lower inflationary scales.

## Contribution

It introduces a Higgs sector into Gauge-flation, studies the stability conditions, and computes the resulting density and gravitational wave spectra, highlighting the model's observational viability.

## Key findings

- The model is unstable for gauge field masses with b3 < 2.
- It produces a chiral gravitational wave spectrum due to parity violation.
- Higgsed Gauge-flation can generate observable gravitational waves at sub-GUT inflationary scales.

## Abstract

We study a variant of Gauge-flation where the gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken by a Higgs sector. We work in the Stueckelberg limit and demonstrate that the dynamics remain (catastrophically) unstable for cases where the gauge field masses satisfy $\gamma < 2$, where $\gamma = g^2\psi^2/H^2$, $g$ is the gauge coupling, $\psi$ is the gauge field vacuum expectation value, and $H$ is the Hubble rate. We compute the spectrum of density fluctuations and gravitational waves, and show that the model can produce observationally viable spectra. The background gauge field texture violates parity, resulting in a chiral gravitational wave spectrum. This arises due to an exponential enhancement of one polarization of the spin-2 fluctuation of the gauge field. Higgsed Gauge-flation can produce observable gravitational waves at inflationary energy scales well below the GUT scale.