Disorder at the Cosmological Collider: Quenched Random Fields
Abstract
Cosmological-collider signals are usually interpreted as clean probes of massive particles present during inflation. In this work, we study a massive spectator field excited by a spatially quenched random source, which may arise from a frozen realization of a light field or environmental sector whose relaxation time is long compared with the inflationary timescale. We determine which features of the collider signal remain reliable probes of the heavy field. After Gaussian disorder averaging, the random source modifies only the statistical component of the propagator, leaving the spectral function and heavy-field poles unchanged. The particle spectrum is therefore preserved, and the logarithmic frequency of the collider oscillations remains fixed by the heavy-field mass. What changes is how the massive modes are excited and imprinted on cosmological correlators: the temporal profile of the source controls the amplitude, phase, and envelope of the oscillations. For a power-law source, the fixed-realization problem is exactly solvable in terms of Lommel functions. Decaying sources can make the nonanalytic clock signal dominant in the squeezed limit, while spatial white noise can destructively interfere with the standard collapsed-trispectrum signal. Thus, mass measurements remain robust against this class of quenched disorder, whereas amplitude-based inferences can depend sensitively on the random environment.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{ferreira2026disorder,
title = {{Disorder at the Cosmological Collider: Quenched Random Fields}},
author = {Matheus Curado Ferreira},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.30095},
eprint = {2609.30095},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30095},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Disorder at the Cosmological Collider: Quenched Random Fields
AU - Matheus Curado Ferreira
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/06
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.30095
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30095
AB - Cosmological-collider signals are usually interpreted as clean probes of massive particles present during inflation. In this work, we study a massive spectator field excited by a spatially quenched random source, which may arise from a frozen realization of a light field or environmental sector whose relaxation time is long compared with the inflationary timescale. We determine which features of the collider signal remain reliable probes of the heavy field. After Gaussian disorder averaging, the random source modifies only the statistical component of the propagator, leaving the spectral function and heavy-field poles unchanged. The particle spectrum is therefore preserved, and the logarithmic frequency of the collider oscillations remains fixed by the heavy-field mass. What changes is how the massive modes are excited and imprinted on cosmological correlators: the temporal profile of the source controls the amplitude, phase, and envelope of the oscillations. For a power-law source, the fixed-realization problem is exactly solvable in terms of Lommel functions. Decaying sources can make the nonanalytic clock signal dominant in the squeezed limit, while spatial white noise can destructively interfere with the standard collapsed-trispectrum signal. Thus, mass measurements remain robust against this class of quenched disorder, whereas amplitude-based inferences can depend sensitively on the random environment.
ER -