Generating enhanced parity-violating gravitational waves during inflation with violation of the null energy condition
Abstract
A violation of the null energy condition (NEC) during inflation in a single-field inflation model will naturally enhance the amplitude of the parity violation effect (defined by ) of inflationary primordial gravitational waves (GWs), provided the inflaton is non-minimally coupled to a gravitational Chern-Simons term. After going through the NEC-violating phase, the Universe enters subsequent slow-roll inflation with a higher energy scale (i.e., a greater Hubble parameter ), which results in an enhanced nearly scale-invariant power spectrum (i.e., ) of inflationary primordial GWs in the high-frequency band, while remains consistent with observations in the frequency band of the cosmic microwave background. Therefore, the violation of NEC during inflation will amplify the observability (i.e., ) of the parity violation effect on small scales. Intriguingly, our model has particular oscillatory features on that may not be mimicked by others.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2212.10893,
title = {Generating enhanced parity-violating gravitational waves during inflation with violation of the null energy condition},
author = {Yong Cai},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.10893},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
24 pages, 16 figures; new references added, updated to match the published version