High Energy Physics Seminar

Special date and time.

Curvatons are light (compared to Hubble during inflation) spectator fields that potentially contribute to adiabatic curvature perturbations post-inflation. They can thereby alter CMB observables such as the spectral index $n_s$, the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$, and the local non-Gaussianity $f_{\rm NL}^{\rm (loc)}$. We systematically explore the observable space of a curvaton with a quadratic potential. We find that when the underlying inflation model does not satisfy the $n_s$ and $r$ observational constraint but can be made viable with a significant curvaton contribution, a large $f_{\rm NL}^{\rm (loc)}$ is inevitable. On the other hand, when the underlying inflation model already satisfies the $n_s$ and $r$ observational constraint, the predicted value of $f_{\rm NL}^{\rm (loc)}$ cannot be distinguished from the single-field inflation prediction in general.

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