A DHOST model of inflation: CMB constraints from the power spectrum and the bispectrum

TL;DR

This paper develops a DHOST inflationary model compatible with Planck CMB data, analyzing both power spectrum and bispectrum to constrain model parameters and demonstrate viability.

Contribution

It introduces a DHOST-based inflation model and provides the first detailed comparison with Planck CMB power spectrum and bispectrum constraints.

Findings

Model compatible with Planck power spectrum data

Bispectrum analysis constrains DHOST parameters

Viable DHOST inflation models satisfy observational constraints

Abstract

We build an inflationary model based on Degenerate Higher Order Scalar Tensor (DHOST) theories in a de Sitter background. We determine the scale-dependent power spectrum of curvature perturbations in these theories and we show that such a model can be compatible with the latest Planck measurements on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We calculate the bispectrum of curvature perturbations in DHOST models and we directly constrain them using the Planck results on non-Gaussianities. We show that the bispectrum consists of a contribution depending only on the power spectrum parameters and a linear combination of terms depending on new parameters. The former peaks in the squeezed limit, while the latter in the equilateral limit. We use the publicly available CMB-BEST code to directly compare the model predictions to the CMB bispectrum statistics and to marginalise over the free parameters, explicitly showing that there are viable DHOST inflationary models that satisfy both the power spectrum and bispectrum constraints from Planck.