English

Resonant non-Gaussianity with equilateral properties

High Energy Physics - Theory 2013-06-18 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

We discuss the effect of superimposing multiple sources of resonant non-Gaussianity, which arise for instance in models of axion inflation. The resulting sum of oscillating shape contributions can be used to "Fourier synthesize" different non-oscillating shapes in the bispectrum. As an example we reproduce an approximately equilateral shape from the superposition of O(10){\cal O}(10) oscillatory contributions with resonant shape. This implies a possible degeneracy between the equilateral-type non-Gaussianity typical of models with non-canonical kinetic terms, such as DBI inflation, and an equilateral-type shape arising from a superposition of resonant-type contributions in theories with canonical kinetic terms. The absence of oscillations in the 2-point function together with the structure of the resonant NN-point functions, imply that detection of equilateral non-Gaussianity at a level greater than the PLANCK sensitivity of fNLO(5)f_{NL}\sim{\cal O}(5) will rule out a resonant origin. We comment on the questions arising from possible embeddings of this idea in a string theory setting.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1211.0070,
  title  = {Resonant non-Gaussianity with equilateral properties},
  author = {Rhiannon Gwyn and Markus Rummel and Alexander Westphal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1211.0070},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

34 pages, 5 figures. Version 2: minor clarifications added, typos fixed

R2 v1 2026-06-21T22:31:20.287Z