Power spectra and circular polarization of primordial gravitational waves with parity and Lorentz violations

Abstract

The violations of parity and Lorentz symmetries in gravity can change the propagating properties of gravitational waves (GWs) in the cosmological background, which can arise from a large number of parity- and Lorentz-violating theories. In this paper, through a systematic parametrization for characterizing possible derivations from the standard GW propagation in general relativity, we study both the parity- and Lorentz-violating effects on the power spectra and the polarization of the primordial gravitational waves (PGWs) during the slow-roll inflation. To this end, we calculate explicitly the power spectrum and the corresponding circular polarization of the PGWs analytically by using the uniform asymptotic approximation. It is shown that the new contributions to power spectra contain two parts, one from the parity-violating terms and the other from the Lorentz-violating terms. While the Lorentz-violating terms can only affect the overall amplitudes of PGWs, the parity-violating terms induce nonzero circular polarization of PGWs, i.e., the left-hand and right-hand polarization modes of GWs have different amplitudes.