English

A New Window on Primordial non-Gaussianity

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2013-05-30 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We know very little about primordial curvature perturbations on scales smaller than about a Mpc. Measurements of the mu-type distortion of the CMB spectrum provide the unique opportunity to probe these scales over the unexplored range from 50 to 10^4 Mpc^-1. This is a very clean probe, in that it relies only on well-understood linear evolution. We point out that correlations between mu-distortion and temperature anisotropies can be used to test Gaussianity at these very small scales. In particular the mu-T cross correlation is proportional to the very squeezed limit of the primordial bispectrum and hence measures fNL^loc, while mu-mu is proportional to the primordial trispectrum and measures tauNL. We present a Fisher matrix forecast of the observational constraints.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1201.5375,
  title  = {A New Window on Primordial non-Gaussianity},
  author = {Enrico Pajer and Matias Zaldarriaga},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1201.5375},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

5 pages, one figure. v2: added clarifying comments and references, fixed typos

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:09:45.990Z