Soubhik Kumar - UC Berkeley - Extending the reach of the cosmological collider

US/Central
Description

Massive field excitations during the inflationary era, imprinted on cosmological correlation functions, can provide us with a unique opportunity to probe heavy degrees of freedom far beyond the reach of terrestrial colliders. In the simplest inflationary models, any such cosmological collider signal is exponentially suppressed for particles much heavier than the inflationary Hubble scale, limiting the potential reach of such new physics searches. In this talk, I will discuss some new approaches to go beyond this limitation: chemical potential-like couplings, coherent oscillation of another massive field, and subdominant oscillations of the inflaton itself for periodic inflationary potentials. This can bring various well-motivated high-scale models, such as GUTs, within the observational window for various near-term surveys.

 

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