Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
Volume 124, Issue 17, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.171301
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Funding
- NASA Astrophysics Theory [NNX17AG48G]
- National Science Foundation [PHY-1719652, ACI-1548562]
- Spanish MINECOs Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa Programme [SEV-2016-059]
- European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant [713366]
- United States Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship [DEFG02-97ER25308]
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- NASA [1001333, NNX17AG48G] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
- STFC [ST/P000762/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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We demonstrate that gravitational waves generated by efficient gauge preheating after axion inflation generically contribute significantly to the effective number of relativistic degrees of freedom N-eff. We show that, with existing Planck limits, gravitational waves from preheating already place the strongest constraints on the inflaton's possible axial coupling to Abelian gauge fields. We demonstrate that gauge preheating can completely reheat the Universe regardless of the inflationary potential. Further, we quantify the variation of the efficiency of gravitational wave production from model to model and show that it is correlated with the tensor-to-scalar ratio. In particular, when combined with constraints on models whose tensor-to-scalar ratios would be detected by next-generation cosmic microwave background experiments, r greater than or similar to 10(-3), constraints from N-eff will probe or rule out the entire coupling regime for which gauge preheating is efficient.
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