Inflationary flavor oscillations and the cosmic spectroscopy

Abstract

Inflationary scenarios motivated by high-energy physics generically contain a plethora of degrees of freedom beyond the primordial curvature perturbation. The latter interacts in a simple way with what we name "inflationary flavor eigenstates", which differ, in general, from freely propagating "mass eigenstates". We show that the mixing between these misaligned states results in new striking behaviors in the squeezed limit of the curvature perturbation three-point function, depending not only on the mass spectrum but also on the "mixing angles" of the theory. These results bring about a new perspective on the cosmological collider program: contrary to a widespread belief, the primordial signal needs not be dominated by the lightest extra degree of freedom. Instead, we show that it may display either modulated oscillations, a broken power law, or a transition from oscillations to a power law, thus offering a detailed cosmic spectroscopy of the particle content of inflation.

arXiv commentv2: 7 pages, 4 figures, minor modifications, version published as a Letter in PRD

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• Closed-Form Formulae for Inflation Correlators
• Parity-Odd and Even Trispectrum from Axion Inflation
• Gravitational Wave Probes of Massive Gauge Bosons at the Cosmological Collider
• Continuous Spectrum on Cosmological Collider