Scratches from the Past: Inflationary Archaeology through Features in the Power Spectrum of Primordial Fluctuations

Inflation may provide unique insight into the physics at the highest available energy scales that cannot be replicated in any realistic terrestrial experiment. Features in the primordial power spectrum are generically predicted in a wide class of models of inflation and its alternatives, and are observationally one of the most overlooked channels for finding evidence for non-minimal inflationary models. Constraints from observations of the cosmic microwave background cover the widest range of feature frequencies, but the most sensitive constraints will come from future large-scale structure surveys that can measure the largest number of linear and quasi-linear modes.
Comment: 5 pages + references, 1 figure; science white paper submitted to the Astro2020 decadal survey