A New Window on Primordial non-Gaussianity
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.
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