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Title:
Dynamical Chern-Simons and gravitational wave mediated particle production
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Abstract:
In many preheating scenarios, the inflaton enters a phase of parametric resonance as it oscillates about the minimum of its potential, producing Standard Model particles through direct couplings. In this work, we take a different perspective by coupling the inflaton solely to gravity via the Chern-Simons term and assume no couplings to the Standard Model. The inflaton then produces gravitational waves which in turn stimulate particle production in the Standard Model sector. After reviewing this process for the case where the matter content consists of a simple, real scalar field, we show how the gravitational waves produce highly polarized spin-1 particles. We then discuss ongoing work surrounding spin-1/2 particle production, which is significantly more complicated than the bosonic cases.
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