Production and Backreaction of Spin-2 Particles of $SU(2)$ Gauge Field during Inflation

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive formalism to compute the production, backreaction, and observational implications of spin-2 particles generated by isotropic SU(2) gauge fields during inflation, applicable to various inflation models.

Contribution

It provides exact analytical formulas for spin-2 particle backreaction and relates their number density to gravitational wave spectra, advancing previous numerical approaches.

Findings

Backreaction constrains the tensor-to-scalar ratio of sourced gravitational waves.

Analytical formulas for spin-2 particle backreaction are derived.

The maximum tensor-to-scalar ratio consistent with small backreaction is of order the vacuum contribution.

Abstract

Primordial SU(2) gauge fields with an isotropic background lead to the production of spin-2 particles during inflation. We provide a unified formalism to compute this effect in all of the inflation models with isotropic SU(2) gauge fields such as Gauge-flation and Chromo-Natural inflation with and without spectator axion fields or the mass of the gauge field from the Higgs mechanism. First, we calculate the number and energy densities of the spin-2 particles. We then obtain exact analytical formulae for their backreaction on the background equations of motion of SU(2) and axion fields in (quasi) de Sitter expansion, which were calculated only numerically for one particular model in the literature. We show that the backreaction is directly related to the number density of the spin-2 field. Second, we relate the number density of the spin-2 particles to the power spectrum and the energy density of the gravitational waves sourced by them. Finally, we use the size of the backreaction to constrain the parameter space of the models. We find that the tensor-to-scalar ratio of the sourced gravitational waves can at most be on the order of that of the vacuum contribution to avoid a large backreaction on slow-roll dynamics of the gauge and axion fields in quasi-de Sitter expansion.