Maldacena on Inflation
Many people have been hoping recently that observations of the cosmic microwave background might provide a “window” into high energy physics well beyond the energy scales accessible in terrestrial accelerators.
So far, however, a concrete (and detectable!) “signal” to look for has proven elusive.
Juan Maldacena has a really nice paper on the leading non-gaussian contributions to the fluctuations in a slow-roll inflationary model. He computes the 3-point functions of scalar and tensor fluctuations. The effect is order (H/Mpl)4, and so probably unobservably small.
Still, a nifty computation.