Measuring primordial anisotropic correlators with CMB spectral distortions

Abstract

We show that inflationary models with broken rotational invariance generate testable off-diagonal signatures in the correlation between the $\mu$-type distortion and temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background. More precisely, scenarios with a quadrupolar bispectrum asymmetry, usually generated by fluctuations of primordial vector fields, produce a nonvanishing $\mu$-$T$ correlation when $|{\ell }_1-{\ell }_2|=2$. Since spectral distortions are sensitive to primordial fluctuations up to very small scales, a cosmic variance limited spectral distortion experiment can detect such effects with a high signal-to-noise ratio.

Comments: 9 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in PRD