Classical Cosmological Collider Physics and Primordial Features

Abstract

Features in the inflationary landscape can inject extra energies to inflation models and produce on-shell particles with masses much larger than the Hubble scale of inflation. This possibility extends the energy reach of the program of cosmological collider physics, in which signals associated with these particles are generically Boltzmann-suppressed. We study the mechanisms of this classical cosmological collider in two categories of primordial features. In the first category, the primordial feature is classical oscillation, which includes the case of coherent oscillation of a massive field and the case of oscillatory features in the inflationary potential. The second category includes any sharp feature in the inflation model. All these classical features can excite unsuppressed quantum modes of other heavy fields which leave observational signatures in primordial non-Gaussianities, including the information about the particle spectra of these heavy degrees of freedom.

49 pages, 14 figures. Changes in v2: clarifications added. Matches the version published in JCAP

References in corpus (21)

• Primordial Non-Gaussianities from Inflation Models
• Generation and Characterization of Large Non-Gaussianities in Single Field Inflation
• Cosmological Collider Physics
• Non-Gaussianity as a Particle Detector
• Curvature Perturbation Spectrum in Two-field Inflation with a Turning Trajectory
• Folded Resonant Non-Gaussianity in General Single Field Inflation
• Cosmological Fluctuations from Infra-Red Cascading During Inflation
• On the Inflationary Perturbations of Massive Higher-Spin Fields
• Boostless Cosmological Collider Bootstrap
• Models of the Primordial Standard Clock
• Inflation: Theory and Observations
• Standard Clock in Primordial Density Perturbations and Cosmic Microwave Background
• Large Spin-2 Signals at the Cosmological Collider
• Cutting Rule for Cosmological Collider Signals: A Bulk Evolution Perspective
• Phase Information in Cosmological Collider Signals
• Probing Leptogenesis with the Cosmological Collider
• Scratches from the Past: Inflationary Archaeology through Features in the Power Spectrum of Primordial Fluctuations
• Large-Field Inflation and the Cosmological Collider
• Searching for Standard Clocks in the Primordial Universe
• On the inflationary massive field with a curved field manifold
• Non-Gaussianity from $X,Y$ gauge bosons in Cosmological Collider Physics

Cited by in corpus (23)

• Cosmological Bootstrap in Slow Motion
• Bootstrapping Multi-Field Inflation: non-Gaussianities from light scalars revisited
• Helical Inflation Correlators: Partial Mellin-Barnes and Bootstrap Equations
• Bootstrapping One-Loop Inflation Correlators with the Spectral Decomposition
• Closed-Form Formulae for Inflation Correlators
• Parity-Odd and Even Trispectrum from Axion Inflation
• NANOGrav signal from axion inflation
• Searching for Cosmological Collider in the Planck CMB Data
• Gravitational Wave Probes of Massive Gauge Bosons at the Cosmological Collider
• Continuous Spectrum on Cosmological Collider
• A Cosmological Bootstrap for Resonant Non-Gaussianity
• Back to the features: assessing the discriminating power of future CMB missions on inflationary models
• There and Back Again: Mapping and Factorising Cosmological Observables
• Probing the initial state of inflation: analytical structure of cosmological correlators
• An Effective Cosmological Collider
• Analytic Formulae for Inflationary Correlators with Dynamical Mass
• The Massive Flat Space Limit of Cosmological Correlators
• Fingerprints of a Non-Inflationary Universe from Massive Fields
• Primordial Clocks within Stochastic Gravitational Wave Anisotropies
• The cosmological collider in $R^2$ inflation
• Investigating the Origin of CMB Large-Scale Features Using LiteBIRD and CMB-S4
• The UV Sensitivity of Axion Monodromy Inflation
• Non-Gaussianity from explicit $U(1)$-breaking interactions