Eternal inflation bubble collision signature on CMB remote dipole and quadrupole fields
Phys. Rev. D 113, 063545 – Published 18 March, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/4c9h-tk5t
Abstract
The remote dipole and quadrupole fields (RDF/RQF) encode information about the observable universe as seen from remote places within our past light cone. Sensitive to the superhorizon inhomogeneities, they provide a unique way to probe physics at the largest scales, bypassing the limitations of cosmic variance inherent in the primary cosmic microwave background (CMB). In this work, we focus on the bubble collision predicted by the eternal inflation theory, which can leave distinct azimuthally symmetric patterns on the superhorizon scales, potentially detectable through the RDF and RQF. We present the first analytic expression of the RQF signal induced by bubble collision and validate it against numerical calculations performed with remotefield, a new public software tool we developed, finding excellent agreement between the two. Combining our new RQF calculation with the corresponding RDF signal calculated by prior work, we forecast the constraining power on bubble collision parameters using RDF/RQF reconstruction. We find that, for a CMB-S4-like and a LSST-like experiment, the RDF reconstruction can provide comparable constraining power as that from the primary CMB alone; and the RQF reconstruction can improve the constraining power by about an order of magnitude. We argue that these constraints can be improved further by including more RDF/RQF multipoles and by using tomographic techniques to mitigate the standard signal. We anticipate the framework we developed in this work to be broadly applicable to probe other superhorizon-scale physics, such as cosmic topology and domain walls.
