A cosmological tachyon collider: enhancing the long-short scale coupling
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jats:titleAjats:scbstract</jats:sc> </jats:title>jats:pThe 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.</jats:p>jats:pHere 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 jats:italiccosmological tachyon collider</jats:italic>.</jats:p>jats:pIn a sizeable region of parameter space, the leading constraint on our signal comes from the cross correlation of jats:italicμ</jats:italic>-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.</jats:p>
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Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Xingang Chen and Jens Chluba for useful discussions. We are also grateful to the organizers and participants of the UK Spectral Distortions Meeting 2023, an event that prompted our investigation. E.P. has been supported in part by the research program VIDI with Project No. 680-47-535, which is (partly) financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). C.M. is supported by Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) training grant ST/W507350/1. This work has been partially supported by STFC consolidated grant ST/T000694/1 and ST/X000664/1 and by the EPSRC New Horizon grant EP/V017268/1.
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1029-8479
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Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) (680-47-535)
STFC (ST/W507350/1)
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/X000664/1)