Spin Spectroscopy During Inflation

 Dr Hayden Lee
HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study

26 Apr 2018 (Thursday)
2:00 pm
IAS4042, 4/F, Lo Ka Chung Building, Lee Shau Kee Campus, HKUST

Cosmological correlation functions encode the spectrum of particles during inflation, in analogy to scattering amplitudes in colliders. Particles with masses comparable to the Hubble scale lead to distinctive signatures on non-Gaussianities that reflect their masses and spins. Interestingly, the symmetries of de Sitter space allow for a category of so-called partially massless particles that have no flat space analog, but could have existed during inflation. In this talk, the speaker will discuss the key spectroscopic features of these particles in the soft limits of scalar/tensor correlation functions, highlighting the role that spin plays in violating the consistency relations of single-field inflation.