Primordial Gravitational Waves from Galaxy Intrinsic Alignments [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2001.05930


Galaxy shapes have been observed to align with external tidal fields generated by the large-scale structures of the Universe. While the main source for these tidal fields is provided by long-wavelength density perturbations, tensor perturbations also contribute with a non-vanishing amplitude at linear order. We show that parity-breaking gravitational waves produced during inflation leave a distinctive imprint in the galaxy shape power spectrum which is not hampered by any scalar-induced tidal field. We also show that a certain class of tensor non-Gaussianities produced during inflation can leave a signature in the density-weighted galaxy shape power spectrum. We estimate the possibility of observing such imprints in future galaxy surveys.

Read this paper on arXiv…

M. Biagetti and G. Orlando
Fri, 17 Jan 20
44/60

Comments: 27 pages, 6 figures, code available at this https URL