Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-1-2015

Publication Title

Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation, and Cosmology

Department

Department of Physics and Astronomy

Abstract

A cosmological gauge field with isotropic stress-energy introduces parity violation into the behavior of gravitational waves. We show that a primordial spectrum of inflationary gravitational waves develops a preferred handedness, left or right circularly polarized, depending on the abundance and coupling of the gauge field during the radiation era. A modest abundance of the gauge field would induce parity-violating correlations of the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization patterns that could be detected by current and future experiments.

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevD.91.123501

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