Non-Gaussianity from inflation: theory and observations

By N. Bartolo, E. Komatsu, S. Matarrese, A. Riotto. Physics reports, 2004

1,104 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This is a review of models of inflation and of their predictions for the primordial non-Gaussianity in the density perturbations which are thought to be at the origin of structures in the Universe. Non-Gaussianity emerges as a key observable to discriminate among competing scenarios for the generation of cosmological perturbations and is one of the primary targets of present and future Cosmic Microwave Background satellite missions. We give a detailed presentation of the state-of-the-art of the subject of non-Gaussianity, both from the theoretical and the observational point of view, and provide all the tools necessary to compute at second order in perturbation theory the level of non-Gaussianity in any model of cosmological perturbations. We discuss the new wave of models of inflation, which are firmly rooted in modern particle physics theory and predict a significant amount of non-Gaussianity. The review is addressed to both astrophysicists and particle physicists and contains useful tables which summarize the theoretical and observational results regarding non-Gaussianity.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a88ba6da3a5db29341cdc65b81c01017aebc4563

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Citations in the corpus

The Quest for B Modes from Inflationary Gravitational Waves (2015, neutral): “Bartolo et al. (2004) discusses nongaussianity and inflation.”
Planck 2015 results. XVII. Constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity (2015, neutral): “Primordial NG is one of the most powerful tests of inflation, and more generally of high-energy early Universe physics (for some reviews, see Bartolo et al. 2004a; Liguori et al. 2010; Chen 2010b; Komatsu 2010; Yadav & Wandelt 2010).”
PRIMORDIAL NON-GAUSSIANITY, SCALE-DEPENDENT BIAS, AND THE BISPECTRUM OF GALAXIES (2009, background): “Therefore, a convincing detection of primordial non-Gaussianity would rule out the above simplest models, and thus lead to a breakthrough in our understanding of the physics of inflation (see Bartolo et al. 2004, for a review).”
Signatures of Initial State Modifications on Bispectrum Statistics (2009, background): “Computations of the primordial bispectra [3,4,7–12,14] (and later trispectra [2,18]) have shown that different models of inflation can produce rather unique features, which would allow, when detected, to discriminate between them.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III DR9 Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity (2012, background): “Primordial non-Gaussianity can also be measured from the bispectrum of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies (see, e.g., Bartolo et al. 2004; Komatsu 2010 and references therein) and, in principle, galaxies (see e.g. Sefusatti & Komatsu 2007; Scoccimarro et al. 2012).”
Primordial non-Gaussianities in single-field inflation (2005, neutral): “Keywords: Cosmological perturbation theory, Inflation, Cosmology of theories beyond the SM, Physics of the early universe astro-ph/0503692”
Large-scale non-Gaussian mass function and halo bias: tests on N-body simulations (2009, background): “While standard single-field models of slow-roll inflation lead to small departures from Gaussianity, non-standard scenarios allow for a larger level of non-Gaussianity (Bartolo et al. 2004 and references therein).”
Primordial Non-Gaussianities from Inflation Models (2010, background): “Comprehensive reviews on the developments of theories and observations of primordial non-Gaussianities up to mid 2004 can be found in [33, 34].”
Primordial Non-Gaussianity (2019, neutral): “At the same time, our understanding of inflation is continually refined, and there is an associated need to improve our understanding of the underlying dynamics directly through constraints on higher-order correlations [1, 8, 9].”
Effects of scale-dependent non-Gaussianity on cosmological structures (2007, neutral): “Contents”