Polarizing primordial gravitational waves by parity violation

Abstract: We study primordial gravitational waves (PGWs) in the Horava-Lifshitz (HL) theory of quantum gravity, in which high-order spatial derivative operators, including the ones violating parity, generically appear in order for the theory to be power-counting renormalizable and ultraviolet (UV) complete. Because of both parity violation and non-adiabatic evolution of the modes due to a modified dispersion relationship, a large polarization of PGWs becomes possible, and it could be well within the range of detection of the BB, TB and EB power spectra of the forthcoming cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations.