Gravitational Waves from Abelian Gauge Fields and Cosmic Strings at Preheating

Understand

Primordial gravitational waves provide a very important stochastic background that could be detected soon with interferometric gravitational wave antennas or indirectly via the induced patterns in the polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background.

• The detection of these waves will open a new window into the early Universe, and therefore it is important to characterize in detail all possible sources of primordial gravitational waves.
• In this paper we develop theoretical and numerical methods to study the production of gravitational waves from out-of-equilibrium gauge fields at preheating.
• We then consider models of preheating after hybrid inflation, where the symmetry breaking field is charged under a local U(1) symmetry.