"Particle Colliders in the Sky — Learning High-Energy Physics with Low Energy Data"
Inflation is amongst the most mysterious phenomena in physics. With an energy scale potentially reaching 10^13 TeV, its physical description likely lies far beyond the realm of the standard model. This leaves many questions unanswered: what fields were present during inflation? how did they interact with each other? In this talk, I will discuss how modern cosmological datasets can be used to shed light on the early Universe by searching for the tell-tale signs of “primordial non-Gaussianity”. In particular, I will present new searches for inflationary signals in Cosmic Microwave Background data, which, for the first time, allow for a detailed study of the primordial four-point function. Leveraging an array of theoretical and computational tricks, these methods can place constraints on the microphysics of inflation and directly probe particle scattering processes in the early Universe, acting as a “cosmological collider”. I will close by discussing future avenues of exploration, including the analysis of galaxy distributions, such as those measured by the DESI survey.
