A New Window on Primordial non-Gaussianity

Abstract

We know very little about primordial curvature perturbations on scales smaller than about a Mpc. Measurements of the mu-type distortion of the CMB spectrum provide the unique opportunity to probe these scales over the unexplored range from 50 to 10^4 Mpc^-1. This is a very clean probe, in that it relies only on well-understood linear evolution. We point out that correlations between mu-distortion and temperature anisotropies can be used to test Gaussianity at these very small scales. In particular the mu-T cross correlation is proportional to the very squeezed limit of the primordial bispectrum and hence measures fNL^loc, while mu-mu is proportional to the primordial trispectrum and measures tauNL. We present a Fisher matrix forecast of the observational constraints.

5 pages, one figure. v2: added clarifying comments and references, fixed typos

References in corpus (1)

• Does Bose-Einstein condensation of CMB photons cancel μ distortions created by dissipation of sound waves in the early Universe?

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