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Paper   IPM / Astronomy / 17924
School of Astronomy
  Title:   Upper Bounds on the Mass of Fundamental Fields from Primordial Universe
  Author(s):  H. Firouzjahi
  Status:   Preprint
  Journal:
  Year:  2024
  Supported by:  IPM
  Abstract:
We study the fluctuations in the vacuum zero point energy associated to quantum fields and their statistical distributions during inflation. It is shown that the perturbations in the vacuum zero point energy have large amplitudes which are highly nonGaussian. The effects of vacuum zero point fluctuations can be interpreted as the loop corrections in primordial power spectrum and bispectrum. Requiring that the primordial curvature perturbation to remain nearly Gaussian and the loop corrections to be under perturbative control impose strong upper bounds on the mass of fundamental fields during inflation. We show that the fundamental fields can not be much heavier than the Hubble scale during inflation, otherwise their vacuum zero point fluctuations induce large non-Gaussianities in primordial perturbations. Considering the observational upper bound on tensor to scalar ratio, we conclude that all fundamental fields are lighter than 1014 GeV.

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