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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Inflationary flavor oscillations and the cosmic spectroscopy

Lucas Pinol

Shuntaro Aoki

Sébastien Renaux-Petel

Masahide Yamaguchi

  • Instituto de Física Teórica UAM-CSIC, c/ Nicolás Cabrera 13-15, 28049 Madrid, Spain

  • Department of Physics, Chung-Ang University, Seoul 06974, Korea

  • Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, GReCO, UMR 7095 du CNRS et de Sorbonne Université, 98bis boulevard Arago, 75014 Paris, France

  • Department of Physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo 152-8551, Japan

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Phys. Rev. D 107, L021301 – Published 17 January, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.107.L021301

Abstract

Inflationary scenarios motivated by high-energy physics generically contain a plethora of degrees of freedom beyond the primordial curvature perturbation. The latter interacts in a simple way with what we name “inflationary flavor eigenstates,” which differ, in general, from freely propagating “mass eigenstates.” We show that the mixing between these misaligned states results in new striking behaviors in the squeezed limit of the curvature perturbation three-point function, depending not only on the mass spectrum but also on the “mixing angles” of the theory. These results bring about a new perspective on the cosmological collider program: contrary to a widespread belief, the primordial signal needs not be dominated by the lightest extra degree of freedom. Instead, we show that it may display either modulated oscillations, a broken power law, or a transition from oscillations to a power law, thus offering a detailed cosmic spectroscopy of the particle content of inflation.

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Phys. Rev. D 107, L021301– Published 17 January, 2023
  • Received 3 February 2022
  • Accepted 22 December 2022
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