Speaker
Elliot Nelson
(Pennsylvania State University)
Description
Non-Gaussianity couples modes of different wavelengths, and long-wavelength background modes can cause statistics averaged in any given region to be biased in comparison to global statistics. We consider the observable universe to be a small subvolume in a larger space, and quantify the degree to which observed quantities (amplitude and scale-dependence of fluctuations, level of non-Gaussianity) may differ from global quantities, and thus the degree to which different inflationary physics (eg. single vs. multi-field) may be indistinguishable due to our limitation to observing a subvolume. We focus on local and scale-dependent local non-Gaussianity, but also consider the effect of the squeezed limit of the bispectrum more generally.
Authors
Elliot Nelson
(Pennsylvania State University)
Prof.
Sarah Shandera
(Pennsylvania State University)
