Non-Gaussianity: Fundamental Interactions and Inflation

Sarah Shandera

March 04, 2010

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Abstract: Inflation may well be one of the highest energy processes we will ever observe. Cosmologists will soon have the observational power to test the fundamental physics of inflation in a very significant way, through measurements of higher order statistics of the primordial curvature perturbations. I will describe the potential impact of these measurements on our understanding of inflation, and show how even qualitative observations can distinguish between very different inflationary physics. I will particularly focus on the connections to large scale structure observations, including cluster number counts and galaxy bias.