Speaker
Description
Cosmic inflation is the name given to the primordial epoch of accelerated expansion responsible for generating the initial conditions of our universe. Occurring at energies far beyond those accessible in terrestrial experiments, it provides an ideal theoretical laboratory to explore new physics. Quite remarkably, the different processes taking place during this era can leave their imprint on the statistics of primordial fluctuations, most notably in the large-scale structure of the Universe and the temperature fluctuations of the CMB. While different inflationary models generally predict these fluctuations to be nearly Gaussian, they can leave unique fingerprints in the form of primordial non-Gaussianities. In warm inflation, the inflaton field dissipates energy through interactions with light particles, while continuous particle production maintains a thermal bath and sources thermal fluctuations. Different models are characterized by a particular dissipation rate $\gamma(T)$. In this work, we study how the dissipation rate $\gamma$ and its temperature dependence, $d\log\gamma/d\log T$, are encoded in the amplitude and shape of the leading non-Gaussian correlation function, the bispectrum.