Probing beyond local-type non-Gaussianity with kSZ tomography

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that kSZ tomography with upcoming surveys can significantly improve constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity, especially for non-local shapes and massive fields, surpassing current methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of kSZ tomography to probe beyond local-type non-Gaussianity, enhancing the sensitivity to the shape and amplitude of primordial bispectra.

Findings

kSZ tomography reduces uncertainty in f_NL by about a factor of two.

It extends the mass range for effective non-Gaussianity constraints.

The method is robust against observational uncertainties.

Abstract

Non-Gaussianity of the primordial curvature perturbations may arise from a variety of well motivated early Universe scenarios. In particular, inflationary theories with additional light degrees of freedom can generate a bispectrum that is peaked in the squeezed limit. While the presence of an additional massless scalar can produce local-type primordial non-Gaussianity, in general the squeezed limit of the bispectrum depends on the mass of the new degree of freedom, and can deviate from the local shape. The resulting bispectrum leaves a distinct imprint on the amplitude and scale-dependence of the galaxy bias, which for massive fields can differ from the $k^{-2}$ scaling from local type non-Gaussianity, providing an observational window into the physics of the early Universe. In this work we demonstrate that kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich tomography with next generation cosmological surveys will offer significant additional constraining power for both the shape and amplitude of scale-dependent bias arising from primordial non-Gaussianity beyond the local type. We show that this improved constraining power is robust to various obstacles such as the optical depth degeneracy, photometric redshift errors, and uncertainty in the galaxy bias model. With CMB S4 and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, we forecast that compared to the galaxy survey alone the addition of kSZ tomography will offer a roughly factor of two reduction in the measurement uncertainty of the amplitude $f_{NL}$ of primordial non-Gaussianity well beyond the local (massless) limit. We find that kSZ tomography extends the range of masses for which order unity constraints on $f_{NL}$ are achievable, as well as extending the range of masses for which the late time probes of the matter power spectrum outperform the sensitivity of the CMB itself.