Scalar induced gravitational waves in chiral scalar-tensor theory of gravity

Abstract

We study the scalar induced gravitational waves (SIGWs) from a chiral scalar-tensor theory of gravity. The parity-violating (PV) Lagrangian contains the Chern-Simons (CS) term and PV scalar-tensor terms, which are built of the quadratic Riemann tensor term and first-order derivatives of a scalar field. We consider SIGWs in two cases, in which the semi-analytic expression to calculate SIGWs can be obtained. Then, we calculate the fractional energy density of SIGWs with a monochromatic power spectrum for the curvature perturbation. We find that the SIGWs in chiral scalar-tensor gravity behave differently from those in GR before and after the peak frequency, which results in a large degree of circular polarization.