Cosmological consequences of classical flavor-space locked gauge field
  radiation
  We propose a classical SU(2) gauge field in a flavor-space locked
configuration as a species of radiation in the early universe, and show that it
would have a significant imprint on a primordial stochastic gravitational wave
spectrum. In the flavor-space locked configuration, the electric and magnetic
fields of each flavor are parallel and mutually orthogonal to other flavors,
with isotropic and homogeneous stress-energy. Due to the non-Abelian coupling,
the gauge field breaks the symmetry between left- and right-circularly
polarized gravitational waves. This broken chiral symmetry results in a unique
signal: non-zero cross correlation of the cosmic microwave background
temperature and polarization, $TB$ and $EB$, both of which should be zero in
the standard, chiral symmetric case. We forecast the ability of current and
future CMB experiments to constrain this model. Furthermore, a wide range of
behavior is shown to emerge, depending on the gauge field coupling, abundance,
and allocation into electric and magnetic field energy density. The fluctuation
power of primordial gravitational waves oscillates back and forth into
fluctuations of the gauge field. In certain cases, the gravitational wave
spectrum is shown to be suppressed or amplified by up to an order of magnitude
depending on the initial conditions of the gauge field.
