English

Shapes of gravity: Tensor non-Gaussianity and massive spin-2 fields

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-10-30 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

If the graviton is the only high spin particle present during inflation, then the form of the observable tensor three-point function is fixed by de Sitter symmetry at leading order in slow-roll, regardless of the theory, to be a linear combination of two possible shapes. This is because there are only a fixed number of possible on-shell cubic structures through which the graviton can self-interact. If additional massive spin-2 degrees of freedom are present, more cubic interaction structures are possible, including those containing interactions between the new fields and the graviton, and self-interactions of the new fields. We study, in a model-independent way, how these interactions can lead to new shapes for the tensor bispectrum. In general, these shapes cannot be computed analytically, but for the case where the only new field is a partially massless spin-2 field we give simple expressions. It is possible for the contribution from additional spin-2 fields to be larger than the intrinsic Einstein gravity bispectrum and provides a mechanism for enhancing the size of the graviton bispectrum relative to the graviton power spectrum.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1812.07571,
  title  = {Shapes of gravity: Tensor non-Gaussianity and massive spin-2 fields},
  author = {Garrett Goon and Kurt Hinterbichler and Austin Joyce and Mark Trodden},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.07571},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

72 pages, 10 figures, v2: minor corrections, matches journal version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T06:46:48.631Z