A Cosmological Tachyon Collider: Enhancing the Long-Short Scale Coupling

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: McCulloch, Ciaran, Pajer, Enrico, Tong, Xi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author McCulloch, Ciaran
Pajer, Enrico
Tong, Xi
author_facet McCulloch, Ciaran
Pajer, Enrico
Tong, Xi
contents The squeezed limit of the primordial curvature bispectrum is an extremely sensitive probe of new physics and encodes information about additional fields active during inflation such as their masses and spins. In the conventional setup, additional fields are stable with a positive mass squared, and hence induce a decreasing signal in the squeezed limit, making a detection challenging. Here we consider a scalar field that is temporarily unstable by virtue of a transient tachyonic mass, and we construct models in which it is embedded consistently within inflation. Assuming IR-finite couplings between the tachyon and the inflaton, we find an exchange bispectrum with an enhanced long-short scale coupling that grows in the squeezed limit parametrically faster than local non-Gaussianity. Our approximately scale-invariant signal can be thought of as a cosmological tachyon collider. In a sizeable region of parameter space, the leading constraint on our signal comes from the cross correlation of $μ$-type spectral distortions and temperature anisotropies of the microwave background, whereas temperature and polarization bispectra are less sensitive probes. By including anisotropic spectral distortions in the analysis, future experiments such as CMB-S4 will further reduce the allowed parameter space.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_11009
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Cosmological Tachyon Collider: Enhancing the Long-Short Scale Coupling
McCulloch, Ciaran
Pajer, Enrico
Tong, Xi
High Energy Physics - Theory
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
The squeezed limit of the primordial curvature bispectrum is an extremely sensitive probe of new physics and encodes information about additional fields active during inflation such as their masses and spins. In the conventional setup, additional fields are stable with a positive mass squared, and hence induce a decreasing signal in the squeezed limit, making a detection challenging. Here we consider a scalar field that is temporarily unstable by virtue of a transient tachyonic mass, and we construct models in which it is embedded consistently within inflation. Assuming IR-finite couplings between the tachyon and the inflaton, we find an exchange bispectrum with an enhanced long-short scale coupling that grows in the squeezed limit parametrically faster than local non-Gaussianity. Our approximately scale-invariant signal can be thought of as a cosmological tachyon collider. In a sizeable region of parameter space, the leading constraint on our signal comes from the cross correlation of $μ$-type spectral distortions and temperature anisotropies of the microwave background, whereas temperature and polarization bispectra are less sensitive probes. By including anisotropic spectral distortions in the analysis, future experiments such as CMB-S4 will further reduce the allowed parameter space.
title A Cosmological Tachyon Collider: Enhancing the Long-Short Scale Coupling
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11009