Parity violation from emergent nonlocality during inflation
File(s)PhysRevD.108.123523.pdf (810.54 KB)
Published version
Author(s)
Jazayeri, Sadra
Renaux-Petel, Sébastien
Tong, Xi
Werth, Denis
Zhu, Yuhang
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Parity violation in the early Universe holds great promise for uncovering new physics. In particular, the primordial scalar four-point correlation function is allowed to develop a parity-violating component when massive spinning particles coupled to a helical chemical potential are present during inflation. In this paper, we explore the rich physics of such a parity-violating trispectrum in the presence of a reduced speed of sound for the Goldstone boson of broken time translations. We show that this signal can be significantly large while remaining under perturbative control, offering promising observational prospects for future cosmological surveys. In the limit of a reduced sound speed, the dynamics admits an effective nonlocal description organized as a time-derivative expansion. This reveals that parity violation arises due to emergent nonlocality in the single-field effective theory. At leading order, this effective theory yields a compact trispectrum template, written in terms of elementary functions. We then conduct a comprehensive analysis of the kinematic dependence of this parity-violating trispectrum and reveal new features. In addition to the low-speed collider resonance, we find a new class of signals lying in the internal soft-limit of the correlator. This signal is characterized by an oscillatory pattern periodic in the momentum ratio, with a frequency determined by the speed of sound and the chemical potential, making it drastically distinct from the conventional cosmological collider signal.
Date Issued
2023-12-15
Date Acceptance
2023-11-09
Citation
Physical Review D: Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology, 2023, 108 (12)
ISSN
1550-2368
Publisher
American Physical Society
Journal / Book Title
Physical Review D: Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
Volume
108
Issue
12
Copyright Statement
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
License URL
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.108.123523
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
123523
Date Publish Online
2023-12-11