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A cosmological bootstrap for resonant non-Gaussianity

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Peer-reviewed

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Abstract

Recent progress has revealed a number of constraints that cosmological correlators and the closely related field-theoretic wavefunction must obey as a consequence of unitarity, locality, causality and the choice of initial state. When combined with symmetries, namely homogeneity, isotropy and scale invariance, these constraints enable one to compute large classes of simple observables, an approach known as (boostless) cosmological bootstrap. Here we show that it is possible to relax the restriction of scale invariance, if one retains a discrete scaling subgroup. We find an infinite class of solutions to the weaker bootstrap constraints and show that they reproduce and extend resonant non-Gaussianity, which arises in well-motivated models such as axion monodromy inflation. We find no evidence of the new non-Gaussian shapes in the Planck data. Intriguingly, our results can be re-interpreted as a deformation of the scale-invariant case to include a complex order of the total energy pole, or more evocatively interactions with a complex number of derivatives. We also discuss for the first time IR-divergent resonant contributions and highlight an inconsequential inconsistency in the previous literature.

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Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Xingang Chen, Paolo Creminelli, Gerrit Farren, James Fergusson, Mehrdad Mirbabayi, Sebastien Renaux-Petel, Eva Silverstein, Wuhyun Sohn and Bowei Zhang for useful discussions. 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). 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.

Keywords

Cosmological models, Space-Time Symmetries, de Sitter space, Early Universe Particle Physics

Journal Title

Journal of High Energy Physics

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1029-8479

Volume Title

2024

Publisher

Springer Berlin Heidelberg