Inflation with the Chern-Simons term in the Palatini formulation

TL;DR

This paper explores how the Chern--Simons term influences inflation in the Palatini formulation of gravity, revealing modifications to the inflaton dynamics, potential solutions to flatness issues, and stabilization of tensor modes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of the Chern--Simons term in the Palatini framework, showing its effects on inflationary dynamics and tensor mode stability, differing from the metric formulation.

Findings

Chern--Simons term modifies the inflaton kinetic term.

It helps preserve potential flatness in polynomial inflation models.

It stabilizes tensor modes against instabilities present in the metric formulation.

Abstract

We consider the Chern--Simons term coupled to the inflaton in the Palatini formulation of general relativity. In contrast to the metric formulation, here the Chern--Simons term affects also the background evolution. We approximately solve for the connection, insert it back into the action, and reduce the order of the equations to obtain an effective theory in the gradient approximation. We consider three cases: when the connection is unconstrained, and when non-metricity or torsion is put to zero. In the first two cases, the inflaton kinetic term is modified with a term proportional to the square of the potential. For polynomial potentials dominated by the highest power of the field, the Chern--Simons term solves the problem that higher order corrections spoil the flatness of the potential. For Higgs inflation, the tensor-to-scalar ratio can be as large as the current observational bound, and the non-minimal coupling to the Ricci scalar can be as small as in the metric case. The Palatini contribution cures the known instability of the tensor modes due to the Chern--Simons term in the metric formulation.