Abstract
Diffusion damping of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum results from imperfect photon-baryon coupling in the pre-recombination plasma. Energy release at redshifts can create -type spectral distortions of the CMB. These distortions trace the underlying photon density fluctuations, probing the primordial power spectrum in short-wavelength modes over the range . Small-scale power modulated by long-wavelength modes from squeezed-limit non-Gaussianities introduces cross correlations between CMB temperature anisotropies and distortions. Under single-field inflation models, correlations measured from an observer in an inertial frame should vanish up to a factor of . Thus, any measurable correlation rules out single-field inflation models. We forecast how well the next-generation ground-based CMB experiment CMB-S4 will be able to constrain primordial squeezed-limit non-Gaussianity, parametrized by , using measurements of as well as from CMB modes. Using current experimental specifications and foreground modeling, we expect . This is roughly 4 times better than the current limit on using and correlations from Planck and is comparable to what is achievable with LiteBIRD, demonstrating the power of the CMB-S4 experiment. This measurement is at an effective scale of and is thus highly complementary to measurements at larger scales from primary CMB and large-scale structure.
- Received 2 March 2023
- Accepted 29 September 2023
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.108.103536
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