Abstract
Effective field theories (EFTs) of heavy particles coupled to the inflaton are rife with operator redundancies, frequently obscured by sensitivity to both boundary terms and field redefinitions. We initiate a systematic study of these redundancies by establishing a minimal operator basis for an archetypal example, the abelian gauge-Higgs-inflaton EFT. Working up to dimension 9, we show that certain low-dimensional operators are entirely redundant and identify new non-redundant operators with potentially interesting cosmological collider signals. Our methods generalize straightforwardly to other EFTs of heavy particles coupled to the inflaton.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank LianTao Wang for useful conversations, Daniel Green for comments on the manuscript, and Dave Sutherland for his deft help with DEFT. The work of NC and AM was supported in part by the Department of Energy under grant DE-SC0011702. The work of SK was supported in part by NSF grant PHY-2210498 and the Simons Foundation. AM acknowledges the hospitality of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics and the theory group of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The research of AM is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists, Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program under contract number DE-SC0014664.
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Craig, N., Kumar, S. & McCune, A. An effective cosmological collider. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 108 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2024)108
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2024)108