Higgsed Gauge-flation

Understand

We study a variant of Gauge-flation where the gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken by a Higgs sector.

• We work in the Stueckelberg limit and demonstrate that the dynamics remain (catastrophically) unstable for cases where the gauge field masses satisfy $\gamma < 2$, where $\gamma = g^2\psi^2/H^2$, $g$ is the gauge coupling, $\psi$ is the gauge field vacuum expectation value, and $H$ is the Hubble rate.
• We compute the spectrum of density fluctuations and gravitational waves, and show that the model can produce observationally viable spectra.
• The background gauge field texture violates parity, resulting in a chiral gravitational wave spectrum.