Higgsed Gauge-flation

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 fi eld masses satisfy gamma < 2, where gamma = g(2)psi(2)/H-2, g is the gauge coupling, psi is the gauge fi eld 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 fi eld texture violates parity, resulting in a chiral gravitational wave spectrum. This arises due to an exponential enhancement of one polarization of the spin-2 fluctuation of the gauge fi eld. Higgsed Gauge-flation can produce observable gravitational waves at inflationary energy scales well below the GUT scale.