Conveners
Session 6: Inflationary Physics I
- Olivier Dore
The dynamics of early universe quantum fields generates a variety of signals amenable to observational tests. This talk will overview the theoretical origin of features in the power spectrum and beyond, including their motivation and structure in UV complete theory.
Large-scale structure observations are remarkably sensitive to primordial features. They are already more constraining than the cosmic microwave background today and will significantly exceed its sensitivity in the future. These oscillatory imprints in the primordial spectra arise from a departure from scale invariance during inflation or its alternatives and, therefore, provide important...
Upcoming large-scale structure (LSS) surveys will provide significant insight into the physics of the early Universe by searching for primordial non-Gaussianity (PNG). Whereas traditional approaches towards constraining PNG with LSS typically focus on phenomenological amplitudes, e.g., $f_{\rm NL}^{\rm loc.}$, which characterize a given "shape" of non-Gaussianity, there exist a range of...
An upcoming suite of cosmological probes of large-scale structure poses a unique opportunity to search for physics beyond the Standard Model. Particles with masses of order Hubble during inflation create a distinct, oscillatory signal in the squeezed limit of the bispectrum. Fully leveraging this property to uncover new physics, a pursuit known as the “cosmological collider”, necessitates a...
Axions, scalar fields with compact field spaces, are some of the most well-motivated candidates for physics beyond the Standard Model. In this talk, I will explain how inflationary correlations are uniquely sensitive to the topology of a scalar's field space, and can thus be used to distinguish axions from other light scalar fields even if they share the exact same action. As a proof of...
