Higher Spin Supersymmetry at the Cosmological Collider: Sculpting SUSY Rilles in the CMB

Abstract

We study the imprint of higher spin supermultiplets on cosmological correlators, namely the non-Gaussianity of the cosmic microwave background. Supersymmetry is used as a guide to introduce the contribution of fermionic higher spin particles, which have been neglected thus far in the literature. This necessarily introduces more than just a single additional fermionic superpartner, since the spectrum of massive, higher spin supermultiplets includes two propagating higher spin bosons and two propagating higher spin fermions, which all contribute to the three point function. As an example we consider the half-integer superspin $\text{Y}=s+1/2$ supermultiplet, which includes particles of spin values $j=s+1,j=s+1/2,j=s+1/2$ and $j=s$. We compute the curvature perturbation 3-point function for higher spin particle exchange and find that the known $P_s(\cos \theta )$ angular dependence is accompanied by superpartner contributions that scale as $P_{s+1}(\cos \theta )$ and ${\sum }_m{P}_s^m(\cos \theta )$, with $P_s$ and $P_s^m$ defined as the Legendre and Associated Legendre polynomials respectively. We also compute the tensor-scalar-scalar 3-point function, and find a complicated angular dependence as an integral over products of Legendre and associated Legendre polynomials.

Comments: v2: references and clarifications added