Axion isocurvature collider

Abstract

Cosmological colliders can preserve information from interactions at very high energy scale, and imprint them on cosmological observables. Taking the squeezed limit of cosmological perturbation bispectrum, information of the intermediate particle can be directly extracted from observations such as cosmological microwave background (CMB). Thus cosmological colliders can be powerful and promising tools to test theoretical models. In this paper, we study extremely light axions (including QCD axions and axion-like-particles), and consider them constituting cold dark matter (CDM) at late times. We are interested in inflationary isocurvature modes by such axions, and try to figure out how axion perturbations can behave as isocurvature colliders. We work out an example where the intermediate particle is a boson, and show that, in the squeezed limit, it is possible to provide a clock signal of significant amplitudes, with a characteristic angular dependence. This provides a channel to contribute and analyze clock signals of isocurvature bispectrum, which we may hopefully see in future experiments.