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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Large-field inflation and the cosmological collider

Matthew Reece1,*, Lian-Tao Wang2,†, and Zhong-Zhi Xianyu3,‡

  • 1Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 2Department of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA
  • 3Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

  • *mreece@g.harvard.edu
  • †liantaow@uchicago.edu
  • ‡zxianyu@tsinghua.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. D 107, L101304 – Published 23 May, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.107.L101304

Abstract

Large-field inflation is a major class of inflation models featuring a near- or super-Planckian excursion of the inflaton field. We point out that the large excursion generically introduces significant scale dependence to spectator fields through inflaton couplings, which in turn induces characteristic distortions to the oscillatory shape dependence in the primordial bispectrum mediated by a spectator field. This so-called cosmological collider signal can thus be a useful indicator of large field excursions. We show an explicit example with signals from the “tower states” motivated by the swampland distance conjecture.

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Phys. Rev. D 107, L101304– Published 23 May, 2023
  • Received 24 June 2022
  • Accepted 3 May 2023
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