Perturbative unitarity in quasi-single field inflation

Abstract

We study implications of perturbative unitarity for quasi-single field inflation with the inflaton and one massive scalar. Analyzing high energy scattering, we show that non-Gaussianities with |fNL| ≳ 1 cannot be realized without turning on interactions which violate unitarity at a high energy scale. Then, we provide a relation between fNL and the scale of new physics that is required for UV completion. In particular we find that for the Hubble scale H ≳ × 109 GeV, Planck suppressed operators can easily generate too large non-Gaussanities and so it is hard to realize successful quasi-single field inflation without introducing a mechanism to suppress quantum gravity corrections. Also we generalize the analysis to the regime where the isocurvature mode is heavy and the inflationary dynamics is captured by the inflaton effective theory. Requiring perturbative unitarity of the two-scalar UV models with the inflaton and one heavy scalar, we clarify the parameter space of the P(X, ϕ) model which is UV completable by a single heavy scalar.