High Energy Physics Signatures from Inflation and Conformal Symmetry of de Sitter

Abstract

During inflation, the geometry of spacetime is described by a (quasi-)de Sitter phase. Inflationary observables are determined by the underlying (softly broken) de Sitter isometry group SO(1, 4) which acts like a conformal group on R^3: when the fluctuations are on super-Hubble scales, the correlators of the scalar fields are constrained by conformal invariance. Heavy fields with mass m larger than the Hubble rate H correspond to operators with imaginary dimensions in the dual Euclidean three-dimensional conformal field theory. By making use of the dS/CFT correspondence we show that, besides the Boltzmann suppression expected from the thermal properties of de Sitter space, the generic effect of heavy fields in the inflationary correlators of the light fields is to introduce power-law suppressed corrections of the form O(H^2/m^2). This can be seen, for instance, at the level of the four-point correlator for which we provide the correction due to a massive scalar field exchange.

21 pages, 5 figures

Cited by in corpus (40)

• A Mellin Space Approach to Cosmological Correlators
• Schwinger-Keldysh Diagrammatics for Primordial Perturbations
• Prospects for Cosmological Collider Physics
• Standard Model Mass Spectrum in Inflationary Universe
• Imprints of Massive Primordial Fields on Large-Scale Structure
• Ward Identities for Scale and Special Conformal Transformations in Inflation
• Neutrino Signatures in Primordial Non-Gaussianities
• Detecting higher spin fields through statistical anisotropy in the CMB and galaxy power spectra
• Landscape tomography through primordial non-Gaussianity
• Classical Cosmological Collider Physics and Primordial Features
• Unique Fingerprints of Alternatives to Inflation in the Primordial Power Spectrum
• Symmetry Constraints in Inflation, $\alpha$-vacua, and the Three Point Function
• The goldstone and goldstino of supersymmetric inflation
• Disentangling mass spectra of multiple fields in cosmological collider
• On the Effective Field Theory for Quasi-Single Field Inflation
• Warm Quasi-Single Field Inflation
• Higgs as heavy-lifted physics during inflation
• Quantum Standard Clocks in the Primordial Trispectrum
• Axion Isocurvature Collider
• Cosmological Shapes of Higher-Spin Gravity
• Heavy Particle Signatures in Cosmological Correlation Functions with Tensor Modes
• Detecting higher spin fields through statistical anisotropy in the CMB bispectrum
• Continuous Spectrum on Cosmological Collider
• The squeezed limit of the bispectrum in multi-field inflation
• Higher-Curvature Corrections and Tensor Modes
• Constraints on long-lived, higher-spin particles from galaxy bispectrum
• Possible Signatures of Inflationary Particle Content: Spin-2 Fields
• The Separate Universe Approach to Soft Limits
• Analytic Formulae for Inflationary Correlators with Dynamical Mass
• Inflation and Conformal Invariance: The Perspective from Radial Quantization
• Primordial Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background Anisotropies: in-in Formalization and Applications
• Fingerprints of a Non-Inflationary Universe from Massive Fields
• Non-Gaussianities in a two-field generalization of Natural Inflation
• Constraining graviton non-Gaussianity through the CMB bispectra
• The cosmological collider in $R^2$ inflation
• Schwinger-Keldysh mechanism in extended quasi single field inflation
• On Observables in a Dark Matter-Clustering Quintessence System
• Inflationary non-Gaussianities in alpha vacua and consistency with conformal symmetries
• Spinning Guest Fields during Inflation: Leftover Signatures
• Cosmology as a CFT${}_1$