Massive-ish Particles from Small-ish Scales: Non-Perturbative Techniques for Cosmological Collider Physics from Large-Scale Structure Surveys

TL;DR

This paper develops non-perturbative methods to detect intermediate-mass particles produced during inflation by analyzing large-scale structure data, enabling constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity deep into the non-linear regime.

Contribution

It introduces models for late-time matter bispectrum and trispectrum sourced by inflationary particles, validated with N-body simulations, and demonstrates their effectiveness in constraining non-Gaussianity.

Findings

Models provide unbiased constraints on non-Gaussianity amplitude.

Simulations show agreement with theoretical predictions for halo bias.

Sample variance cancellation enhances information extraction.

Abstract

Massive particles produced during inflation impact soft limits of primordial correlators. Searching for these signatures presents an exciting opportunity to uncover the particle spectrum in the inflationary epoch. We present non-perturbative methods to constrain intermediate-mass scalars ($0\leq m/H<3/2$, where $H$ is the inflationary Hubble scale) produced during inflation, which give rise to a power-law scaling in the squeezed primordial bispectrum. Exploiting the large-scale structure consistency relations and the separate universe approach, we derive models for the late-time squeezed matter bispectrum and collapsed matter trispectrum sourced by these fields. To validate our models, we run $N$-body simulations with the "Cosmological Collider" squeezed bispectrum for two different particle masses. Our models yield unbiased constraints on the amplitude of non-Gaussianity, $f_{\rm NL}^{\Delta}$, from the squeezed bispectrum and collapsed trispectrum deep into the non-linear regime ($k_{\rm max}\approx 2~h/{\rm Mpc}$ at $z=0$). We assess the information content of these summary statistics, emphasizing the importance of sample variance cancellation in the matter sector. We also study the scale-dependent halo bias in our simulations. For mass-selected halos, the non-Gaussian bias estimated from our simulations agrees with predictions based on (i) separate universe simulations and (ii) universal mass functions. With further work, these results can be used to search for inflationary massive particle production with upcoming galaxy surveys.