Production and Backreaction of Spin-2 Particles of SU(2)SU(2) Gauge Field during Inflation

Primordial SU(2) gauge fields with an isotropic background lead to the production of spin-2 particles during inflation. We provide a unified formalism to compute this effect in all of the inflation models with isotropic SU(2) gauge fields such as Gauge-flation and Chromo-Natural inflation with and without spectator axion fields or the mass of the gauge field from the Higgs mechanism. First, we calculate the number and energy densities of the spin-2 particles. We then obtain exact analytical formulae for their backreaction on the background equations of motion of SU(2) and axion fields in (quasi) de Sitter expansion, which were calculated only numerically for one particular model in the literature. We show that the backreaction is directly related to the number density of the spin-2 field. Second, we relate the number density of the spin-2 particles to the power spectrum and the energy density of the gravitational waves sourced by them. Finally, we use the size of the backreaction to constrain the parameter space of the models. We find that the tensor-to-scalar ratio of the sourced gravitational waves can at most be on the order of that of the vacuum contribution to avoid a large backreaction on slow-roll dynamics of the gauge and axion fields in quasi-de Sitter expansion.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures. v2: Section 6.1 is adde

Revisiting Cosmic No-Hair Theorem for Inflationary Settings

In this work we revisit Wald's cosmic no-hair theorem in the context of accelerating Bianchi cosmologies for a generic cosmic fluid with non-vanishing anisotropic stress tensor and when the fluid energy momentum tensor is of the form of a cosmological constant term plus a piece which does not respect strong or dominant energy conditions. Such a fluid is the one appearing in inflationary models. We show that for such a system anisotropy may grow, in contrast to the cosmic no-hair conjecture. In particular, for a generic inflationary model we show that there is an upper bound on the growth of anisotropy. For slow-roll inflationary models our analysis can be refined further and the upper bound is found to be of the order of slow-roll parameters. We examine our general discussions and our extension of Wald's theorem for three classes of slow-roll inflationary models, generic multi-scalar field driven models, anisotropic models involving U(1) gauge fields and the gauge-flation scenario.Comment: 21 pp, 4 .eps figure

Gauge-flation: Inflation From Non-Abelian Gauge Fields

Inflationary models are usually based on dynamics of one or more scalar fields coupled to gravity. In this work we present a new class of inflationary models, gauge-flation or non-Abelian gauge field inflation, where slow-roll inflation is driven by a non-Abelian gauge field. This class of models are based on a gauge field theory with a generic non-Abelian gauge group minimally coupled to gravity. We then focus on a particular gauge-flation model by specifying the action for the gauge theory which allows for a successful slow-roll inflation. This model has two parameters the value of which can be fixed using the CMB and other cosmological data. These values are within the natural range of parameters in generic grand unified theories of particle physics.Comment: Revtex4-1 format, 5 pages, v4: cosmic perturbation theory improve

Gauge-flation and Cosmic No-Hair Conjecture

Gauge-flation, inflation from non-Abelian gauge fields, was introduced in [1,2]. In this work, we study the cosmic no-hair conjecture in gauge-flation. Starting from Bianchi-type I cosmology and through analytic and numeric studies we demonstrate that the isotropic FLRW inflation is an attractor of the dynamics of the theory and that the anisotropies are damped within a few e-folds, in accord with the cosmic no-hair conjecture.Comment: 24 pages, 18 figure

Gauged M-flation, its UV sensitivity and Spectator Species

In this paper we study gauged M-flation, an inflationary model in which inflation is driven by three NxN scalar field matrices in the adjoint representation of U(N) gauge group. We focus our study on the gauged M-flation model which could be derived from the dynamics of a stack of D3-branes in appropriate background flux. The background inflationary dynamics is unaltered compared to the ungauged case of [arXiv:0903.1481[hep-th]], while the spectrum of "spectator species", the isocurvature modes, differs from the ungauged case. Presence of a large number of spectators, although irrelevant to the slow-roll inflationary dynamics has been argued to lower the effective UV cutoff $\Lambda$ of the theory from the Planck mass, invalidating the main advantage of M-flation in not having super-Planckian field values and unnaturally small couplings. Through a careful analysis of the spectrum of the spectators we argue that, contrary to what happens in N-flation models, M-flation is still UV safe with the modified (reduced) effective UV cutoff $\Lambda$, which we show to be of order (0.5-1)x10^{-1} M_{pl}. Moreover, we argue that the string scale in our gauged M-flation model is larger than $\Lambda$ by a factor of 10 and hence one can also neglect stringy effects. We also comment on the stability of classical inflationary paths in the gauged M-flation.Comment: 16 pages, no figures; v2: added remarks and two references; v3: JCAP versio

Issues on Generating Primordial Anisotropies at the End of Inflation

We revisit the idea of generating primordial anisotropies at the end of inflation in models of inflation with gauge fields. To be specific we consider the charged hybrid inflation model where the waterfall field is charged under a U(1) gauge field so the surface of end of inflation is controlled both by inflaton and the gauge fields. Using delta N formalism properly we find that the anisotropies generated at the end of inflation from the gauge field fluctuations are exponentially suppressed on cosmological scales. This is because the gauge field evolves exponentially during inflation while in order to generate appreciable anisotropies at the end of inflation the spectator gauge field has to be frozen and scale invariant. We argue that this is a generic feature, that is, one can not generate observable anisotropies at the end of inflation within an FRW background.Comment: V3: new references added, JCAP published versio