Journal
JOURNAL OF COSMOLOGY AND ASTROPARTICLE PHYSICS
Volume -, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2014/01/033
Keywords
inflation; non-gaussianity
Funding
- European Research Council (ERC STG grant) [279617]
- Stanford ITP
- U.S. Department of Energy [DE-AC02-76SF00515]
- NSF [PHY-0757868]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We show that the recent Planck limits on primordial non-Gaussianity impose strong constraints on light hidden sector fields coupled to the inflaton via operators suppressed by a high mass scale A. We study a simple effective field theory in which a hidden sector field is coupled to a shift-symmetric inflaton via arbitrary operators up to dimension five. Self-interactions in the hidden sector lead to non-Gaussianity in the curvature perturbations. To be consistent with the Planck limit on local non-Gaussianity, the coupling to any hidden sector with light fields and natural cubic couplings must be suppressed by a very high scale Lambda > 10(5)H. Even if the hidden sector has Gaussian correlations, nonlinearities in the mixing with the inflaton still lead to non-Gaussian curvature perturbations. In this case, the non-Gaussianity is of the equilateral or orthogonal type, and the Planck data requires Lambda > 10(2)H.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available