Looking for signs of low scale inflation at high energy colliders

As the bound on the scalar to tensor ratio continues to fall without signs of primordial gravitational waves, the simplest high scale models of inflation are becoming increasingly disfavored. It’s possible that no scalar to tensor ratio will be discovered, in which case, we’re going to have to look for less conventional signs of the inflaton if we want to figure out how inflation happened. Low scale inflation could open up the possibility of finding signatures from the inflaton in a collider. I’ll describe detection prospects for one particular small field model I find compelling using a second field, a curvaton, to mitigate the amount of tuning needed to achieve small field inflation.

Slides