Large-Field Inflation and the Cosmological Collider

Abstract

Large-field inflation is a major class of inflation models featuring a near- or super-Planckian excursion of the inflaton field. We point out that the large excursion generically introduces significant scale dependence to spectator fields through inflaton couplings, which in turn induces characteristic distortions to the oscillatory shape dependence in the primordial bispectrum mediated by a spectator field. This so-called cosmological collider signal can thus be a useful indicator of large field excursions. We show an explicit example with signals from the "tower states" motivated by the swampland distance conjecture.

8 pages

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• Gravitational Wave Probes of Massive Gauge Bosons at the Cosmological Collider
• Continuous Spectrum on Cosmological Collider
• There and Back Again: Mapping and Factorising Cosmological Observables
• Analytic Formulae for Inflationary Correlators with Dynamical Mass
• Thermodynamics and decay of de Sitter vacuum
• The Massive Flat Space Limit of Cosmological Correlators
• Fingerprints of a Non-Inflationary Universe from Massive Fields
• The cosmological collider in $R^2$ inflation
• Strongly Coupled Sectors in Inflation: Gapped Theories of Unparticles
• Searching for Unparticles with the Cosmic Microwave Background