Vacuum Amplification of Chiral Gravitational Waves and the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background

TL;DR

This paper studies how vacuum amplification in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity can produce chiral gravitational waves, affecting the stochastic gravitational wave background, with implications for current and future gravitational wave observations.

Contribution

It develops a framework to compute graviton production from parity-violating effects and explores various pseudoscalar evolution scenarios impacting the gravitational wave spectrum.

Findings

Parity-violating contributions dominate under certain pseudoscalar evolutions.

Spectra can surpass flat spectra when pseudoscalar velocity changes rapidly.

Predicted spectra are compared with observational sensitivities.

Abstract

We investigate cosmological vacuum amplification of gravitational waves in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity. We develop a comprehensive framework to compute graviton production induced by the parity violating Pontryagin coupling and study its imprint on the stochastic gravitational wave background energy power spectrum. We explore gravitational vacuum amplification in four concrete scenarios for the evolution of the Chern-Simons pseudoscalar. We show that a parity-violating contribution dominates over an initially flat spectrum when the velocity of the pseudoscalar quickly interpolates between two asymptotically constant values or when it is nonvanishing and constant through a finite period of time. This is also the case when we parametrize the pseudoscalar evolution by a perfect fluid with radiation- and dust-like equations of state for large enough values of its energy density. The resulting spectra are compared with the sensitivity curves of current and future gravitational wave observational searches.