Large Spin-2 Signals at the Cosmological Collider

Understand

We study the theory and phenomenology of massive spin-2 fields during the inflation with nonzero background chemical potential, and extend the cosmological collider physics to tensor modes.

• We identify a unique dimension-5 and parity-violating chemical potential operator for massive spin-2 fields, which leads to a ghost-free linear theory propagating one scalar mode and two tensor modes.
• The chemical potential greatly boosts the production of one tensor mode even for very heavy spin-2 particles, and thereby leads to large and distinct cosmological collider signals for massive spin-2 particles.
• The large signals show up at the tree-level in both the curvature trispectrum and the tensor-curvature mixed bispectrum.