Related papers: Parity-Odd and Even Trispectrum from Axion Inflati…
Detecting parity violation on cosmological scales would provide a striking clue to new physics. Large-scale structure offers the raw statistical power -- many three-dimensional modes -- to make such tests. However, for scalar observables,…
Violation of parity symmetry in the gravitational sector, which manifests into unequal left and right circular polarization states of primordial gravitational waves, represents a way to test high-energy modifications to general relativity.…
Several alternative ways to quantize gravitational interactions seem to indicate that gravity at short distances is effectively two-dimensional. If this were true, and the energy scale at which the dimensional transition occurs is of the…
We study an inflationary model developed by Kaloper and Sorbo, in which the inflaton is an axion with a sub-Planckian decay constant, whose potential is generated by mixing with a topological 4-form field strength. This gives a 4d…
The Chern-Simons gravitational term is typically coupled to the inflaton field during inflation. In this work, we explore an alternative scenario where the Chern-Simons term is minimally coupled to a massive spectator field, $\sigma$,…
We investigate the coupling between the inflaton and massive vector fields. All renormalizable couplings with shift symmetry of the inflaton are considered. The massive vector can be decomposed into a scalar mode and a divergence-free…
Recent measurements of the 4-point correlation function in large-scale galaxy surveys have found apparent evidence of parity violation in the distribution of galaxies. This cannot happen via dynamical gravitational effects in general…
Many inflationary theories introduce new scalar, vector, or tensor degrees of freedom that may then affect the generation of primordial density perturbations. Here we show how to search a galaxy (or 21-cm) survey for the imprint of…
Inspired by the chromo-natural inflation model of Adshead&Wyman, we reshape its scalar content to relax the tension with current observational bounds. Besides an inflaton, the setup includes a spectator sector in which an axion and SU(2)…
Axions play a central role in many realizations of large field models of inflation and in recent alternative mechanisms for generating primordial tensor modes in small field models. If these axions couple to gauge fields, the coupling…
In Aligned Natural Inflation, an alignment between different potential terms produces an inflaton excursion greater than the axion scales in the potential. We show that, starting from a general potential of two axions with two aligned…
Because of their quantum fluctuations, axion fields had a chance to experience field excursions traversing many minima of their potentials during inflation. We study this situation by analyzing the dynamics of an axion-spectator field…
We propose a scenario where inflation is driven by non-minimally coupled massive vector fields. In an isotropic homogeneous universe these fields behave in presicely the same way as a massive minimally coupled scalar field. Therefore our…
We revisit the possibility of producing observable tensor modes through a continuous particle production process during inflation. Particularly, we focus on the multi-field realization of inflation where a spectator pseudo-scalar $\sigma$…
Because the inflationary mechanism is extremely sensitive to UV-physics, the construction of theoretically robust models of inflation provides a unique window on Planck-scale physics. We review efforts to use an axion with a shift symmetry…
In the recent paper [3] it was shown that the consistency of the quantum theory of a sterile scalar coupled to massive fermions requires the inclusion of odd-power terms in the potential of scalar self-interaction. One of the most important…
We investigate the consequences of a transient phase of enhanced parity violation during inflation. Modeling this phase through a time-localized Chern--Simons-like coupling, we show that it amplifies primordial gravitational waves at small…
Massive fields during inflation provide an interesting opportunity to test new physics at very high energy scales. Meanwhile in fundamental realizations, the inflationary field space typically has a curved geometry, which may leave…
We have studied preheating of field perturbations in a 3-dimensional lattice including the effect of scalar metric perturbations, in two generic models of inflation: chaotic inflation with a quartic potential, and standard hybrid inflation.…
We study the inflationary implications of a novel parity-violating gravity model, which modifies the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity by introducing the Nieh-Yan term coupled to an axion-like field. The parity-violating…