# Nonlinear perturbations from axion-gauge fields dynamics during inflation

## TL;DR

This paper investigates a modified axion-gauge field inflation model where gravitational interactions enhance perturbation couplings, affecting gravitational wave production and constraining viable parameter space for observable signals.

## Contribution

It introduces a variant of Chromo-Natural Inflation with gravitationally coupled inflaton and gauge fields, analyzing the nonlinear effects on perturbations and gravitational wave generation.

## Key findings

- Enhanced coupling between inflaton and gauge perturbations due to gravitational interaction.
- Constraints on model parameters to produce observable gravitational waves without excessive scalar perturbations.
- Limited parameter space where the model can generate detectable sourced gravitational waves.

## Abstract

We study a variant of the Chromo-Natural Inflation (CNI) mechanism in which the inflaton interacts only gravitationally with the CNI fields. Integrating out all the non-dynamical scalar fields of the model results in a coupling between the perturbations of the inflaton and of the CNI pseudo-scalar which is significantly greater than the one obtained in the absence of the gauge CNI dynamics. We compute how this greater coupling impacts the power spectrum of the inflaton perturbations that are sourced nonlinearly by the unstable (tensor) gauge CNI modes, and we require that the amplitude of these modes is well below that of the linear perturbations. Combining this result with various constraints, including backreaction effects, the requirement of having observable and dominant sourced gravitational waves (GW), and the current upper bound on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, significantly constrains the range of parameter space where this model can produce an interesting GW signal.