Bootstrapping the Cosmological Collider with Resonant Features

Abstract

Signatures of heavy particles during inflation are exponentially suppressed by the Boltzmann factor when the masses are far above the Hubble scale. In more realistic scenarios, however, scale-dependent features may change this conventional picture and boost the cosmological collider signals. In this paper, we compute cosmological correlators of the primordial curvature perturbations exchanging an intermediate heavy field with periodically varying couplings. The basic setup corresponds to inflation scenarios with globally oscillating features that enjoy a discrete shift symmetry. Adopting the bootstrap approach, we derive and solve the boundary differential equations that are satisfied by the massive-exchange three-point functions. The presence of the oscillatory couplings leads to resonance-enhanced cosmological collider signals for heavy fields when the oscillating frequency exceeds the field masses. Meanwhile, the forms of these differential equations are modified, which generates new shapes of primordial non-Gaussianity as a combination of resonant features and collider signals. Based on these computations, we revisit the string-inspired model of axion monodromy inflation and point out that the cosmological correlators can become sensitive to heavy moduli fields of flux compactifications. This finding suggests a breakdown of the conventional single-field description, as the heavy moduli may not be simply integrated out but yield detectably large signals in the primordial bispectrum.