Boosting GWs in supersolid inflation

Abstract

Inflation driven by a generic self-gravitating medium is an interesting alternative to study the impact of spontaneous spacetime symmetry breaking during a quasi de-Sitter phase, in particular the 4-dimensional diffeomorphism invariance of GR is spontaneously broken down to I SO(3). The effective description is based on four scalar fields that describe the excitations of a supersolid. There are two phonon-like propagating scalar degrees of freedom that mix non-trivially both at early and late times and, after exiting the horizon, give rise to non-trivial correlations among the different scalar power spectra. The non-linear structure of the theory allows a secondary gravitational waves production during inflation, efficient enough to saturate the present experimental bound and with a blue-tilted spectral index.