Scale-dependent chirality as a smoking gun for Abelian gauge fields during inflation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the scale-dependent chirality of gravitational waves produced during axion inflation with an Abelian gauge field, using numerical methods to improve upon previous analytic approximations and identify key observational signatures.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical approach to study gauge field production during inflation, revealing significant deviations from prior Gaussian-based models and deriving a consistency relation for GW chirality and spectral index.

Findings

Significant deviation from log-normal vector field excitation models.

Identification of scale-dependent GW chirality as a key signature.

Derivation of a consistency relation linking GW chirality and spectral index.

Abstract

Axion-inflation models are a compelling candidate as a mechanism behind the accelerated expansion in the early universe in light of the possibility to embed them in higher dimensional UV complete theories and the exciting prospect of testing them with next-generation cosmological probes. Adding an Abelian gauge sector to axion-inflation models makes for a rich, interesting, phenomenology spanning from primordial black holes to gravitational waves (GWs). Several recent studies employ an approximate analytic (Gaussian) template to characterize the effect of gauge field production on cosmological perturbations. In this work we go beyond such approximation and numerically study particle production and the ensuing scalar and tensor spectra. We find a significant deviation from results based on log-normally distributed vector field excitations. As an important phenomenological application of the improved method, we study the expected chirality and spectral index of the sourced GW background at scales relevant for current and next-generation GW detectors. One striking feature is that of a scale-dependent chirality. We derive a consistency relation between these two observables that can serve as an important tool in identifying key signatures of multi-field dynamics in axion inflation.