Gravitational waves in vector inflation

Abstract

We discuss the gravitational waves (GW) in the context of vector inflation. We derive the action for tensor perturbations and find that tachyonic instabilities are present in most (but not all) of the inflationary models with large fields. In contrast, the stability of the small field inflation ($A_{_s18mu}A^{_s18mu}_s18ll_s18frac{1}{N}$) is ensured by the usual slow-roll conditions, where $N$ is the total number of fields. For example, the Coleman-Weinberg potential and the power-law inflation are always stable in the small fields limit with an approximately flat spectrum of GW. We also provide some examples which lead to a rapid decay of GW and predict the absence of tensor modes in the CMB.