Planck-suppressed operators

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.