Speaker: Soubhik Kumar
Title: Classical Cosmological Collider Physics
Room: 3024
Host: Da Liu
Abstract: Massive field excitations during the inflationary era, imprinted on cosmological correlation functions, can provide us with a unique opportunity to probe heavy degrees of freedom far beyond the reach of terrestrial colliders. In the simplest inflationary models, any such cosmological collider signal is exponentially suppressed for particles much heavier than the inflationary Hubble scale, limiting the potential reach of such new physics searches. In this talk, I will discuss how primordial features on the inflationary landscape can naturally excite very heavy modes. Respecting the current bounds on the power spectrum, I will show that this mechanism can extend the reach of the cosmological collider by one or two orders of magnitude. This can bring various well-motivated high-scale models, such as GUTs, within the observational window for various near-term surveys.
