High Energy Physics Seminar

Various well motivated scenarios beyond the Standard Model predict states/particles with extremely heavy masses. However, those are often too heavy to be produced in terrestrial or astrophysical environments. The hot, energetic early Universe provides an exciting opportunity to overcome this challenge. I will show how particles with masses up to 10^16 GeV, close to the scale of Grand Unification, can be produced on-shell during cosmic inflation. I will discuss how these particles can leave their signatures in two complementary ways. The first is via primordial non-Gaussianity, which can capture the mass-spin signatures of heavy particles in certain kinematic configurations. The second is via localized signatures in the primordial density field in position space. These localized features can ultimately lead to hot spots on the cosmic microwave background or rare galaxies at very high redshifts. I will discuss searches for both types of signatures using Planck data.

The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

Contact [email protected] for Zoom link.