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Massive spinning particles, if present during inflation, lead to a distinctive bispectrum of primordial perturbations, the shape and amplitude of which depend on the masses and spins of the extra particles. This signal, in turn, leaves an…
Features in the inflationary landscape can inject extra energies to inflation models and produce on-shell particles with masses much larger than the Hubble scale of inflation. This possibility extends the energy reach of the program of…
The inflationary universe can be viewed as a "Cosmological Collider" with energy of Hubble scale, producing very massive particles and recording their characteristic signals in primordial non-Gaussianities. To utilize this collider to…
We investigate the quantumness of primordial cosmological fluctuations and its detectability. The quantum discord of inflationary perturbations is calculated for an arbitrary splitting of the system, and shown to be very large on…
We investigate the gravitational production of a scalar field $\chi$ with a mass exceeding the Hubble scale during inflation $m_\chi \gtrsim H_I$, employing both analytical and numerical approaches. We demonstrate that the steepest descent…
We describe a new mechanism that gives rise to dissipation during cosmic inflation. In the simplest implementation, the mechanism requires the presence of a massive scalar field with a softly-broken global $U(1)$ symmetry, along with the…
We show that models of new particle physics containing massless pseudoscalar fields super-weakly coupled to photons can be very efficiently probed with CMB polarization anisotropies. The stochastic pseudoscalar fluctuations generated during…
Following Philcox et al. (2025), we investigate a scenario with a massive partner to the inflaton ($O(100)$ times the inflationary Hubble scale), in which particles are produced during a narrow time period, leaving characteristic hot- or…
Fluctuations in the intensity and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe each contain clues about the nature of the earliest moments of time. The next generation of…
Cosmic inflation provides a mechanism for generating the early density perturbations that seeded the large-scale structures we see today. Primordial non-Gaussianity is among the most promising of few observational tests of physics at this…
Primordial non-Gaussianity generated by additional fields during inflation offers a compelling observational target. Heavy fields imprint characteristic oscillatory signals in non-Gaussian correlation functions of the inflaton, a process…
The creation of ultra-light dark particles in the late-time FLRW spacetime provides a cosmological model in accordance with precise observational tests. The matter creation backreaction implies in this context a vacuum energy density…
Primordial non-Gaussianity signatures of extremely heavy particles are re-examined within a simple alternative to the standard inflationary paradigm, in which the primordial fluctuations and the inflationary spacetime expansion are sourced…
We study a model of inflation where the scalar perturbations are almost gaussian while there is sizable (equilateral) nongaussianity in the tensor sector. In this model, a rolling pseudoscalar gravitationally coupled to the inflaton…
Future measurements of primordial non-Gaussianity can reveal cosmologically produced particles with masses of order the inflationary Hubble scale and their interactions with the inflaton, giving us crucial insights into the structure of…
We calculate the scale dependence of the bispectrum and trispectrum in (quasi) local models of non-Gaussian primordial density perturbations, and characterize this scale dependence in terms of new observable parameters. They can help to…
We show that inflationary cosmology may be used to test the statistical predictions of quantum theory at very short distances and at very early times. Hidden-variables theories, such as the pilot-wave theory of de Broglie and Bohm, allow…
The representation theory of de Sitter space allows for a category of partially massless particles which have no flat space analog, but could have existed during inflation. We study the couplings of these exotic particles to inflationary…
Non-Gaussianity in the distribution of inflationary perturbations, measurable in statistics of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large scale structure fluctuations, can be used to probe non-trivial initial quantum states for these…
The standard model of cosmology with nearly Gaussian, isotropic, scale invariant and adiabatic initial conditions describes the cosmological observations well. However, the study of any deviation from the mentioned conditions will open up a…