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arXiv · 2504.05389

Primordial Stochastic Gravitational Waves from Massive Higher-Spin Bosons

Abstract

Can a stationary stone radiate gravitational waves (GWs)? While the answer is typically "no" in flat spacetime, we get a "yes" in inflationary spacetime. In this work, we study the stationary-stone-produced GWs in inflation with a concrete model, where the role of stones is played by massive higher-spin particles. We study particles of spin-2 and higher produced by helical chemical potentials, and show that the induced GWs feature a scale-invariant and helicity-biased power spectrum in the slow-roll limit. Including slow-roll corrections leads to interesting backreactions from the higher-spin boson production, resulting in an intriguing scale-dependence of GWs at small scales. Given the existing observational and theoretical constraints, we identify viable parameter regions capable of generating visibly large GWs for future observations.

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Haipeng An, Zhehan Qin, Zhong-Zhi Xianyu, Borui Zhang. 2025-04-07. Primordial Stochastic Gravitational Waves from Massive Higher-Spin Bosons. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05389

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