Heavy-Lifting of Gauge Theories by Cosmic Inflation

Future measurements of primordial non-Gaussianity (NG) can reveal the existence of cosmologically produced particles with masses of order the inflationary Hubble scale which can be as high as 10^13 GeV. In this talk I will describe how certain theories including (partially) Higgsed gauge theories having such particles can leave observable signatures in future NG measurements giving us a chance to do a spectroscopy of their masses and spins. In particular, I will focus on a “heavy-lifting” mechanism in which couplings to curvature can result in Higgs scales of order the Hubble scale during inflation while reducing to far lower scales in the current era, where they may now be accessible to collider and other laboratory experiments. Such a mechanism is testable in the sense that renormalization-group running of terrestrial measurements can yield predictions for cosmological NG. Ref: 1711.03988