Cosmological Bootstrap in Slow Motion

by Sadra Jazayeri (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS)

Wednesday 14 Sept 2022, 16:30 → 18:30 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

Inflation can be viewed as a natural "cosmological particle detector" which can probe energies as high as its Hubble scale. In this talk, I study the imprints of heavy relativistic particles during inflation on primordial correlators in situations where the scalar fluctuations have a reduced speed of sound. Breaking dS boosts allows new types of footprints of massive fields to emerge. In particular, I show that heavy particles that are lighter than Hubble divided by the speed of sound leave smoking gun imprints in the three-point function of curvature perturbations (due to the exchange of those fields) in the form of resonances in the squeezed limit which are vividly distinct from the previously explored signatures of heavy fields in de Sitter correlators. Throughout I use and extend the cosmological bootstrap techniques derived from locality, unitarity, and analyticity in order to find fully analytical formulae for the desired boost breaking correlators.