English

Shapes of non-Gaussianity in warm inflation

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2023-02-28 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Sphaleron heating has been recently proposed as a mechanism to realize warm inflation when inflaton is an axion coupled to pure Yang-Mills. As a result of heating, there is a friction coefficient γT3\gamma \propto T^3 in the equation of motion for the inflaton, and a thermal contribution to cosmological fluctuations. Without the knowledge of the inflaton potential, non-Gaussianity is the most promising way of searching for the signatures of this model. Building on an earlier work by Bastero-Gil, Berera, Moss and Ramos, we compute the scalar three-point correlation function and point out some distinct features in the squeezed and folded limits. As a detection strategy, we show that the combination of the equilateral template and one new template has a large overlap with the shape of non-Gaussianity over the range 0.01γ/H10000.01 \leq\gamma/H\leq 1000, and in this range 0.7<fNL<500.7 <|f_{\rm NL}| < 50.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.13227,
  title  = {Shapes of non-Gaussianity in warm inflation},
  author = {Mehrdad Mirbabayi and Andrei Gruzinov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.13227},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

v2: JCAP version, 35 pages, 9 figures, extra refs and comments with respect to v1