Large-scale messengers from massive higher spin fields

Abstract

We show that nonperturbative production of massive higher spin fields from vacuum will accompany the generation of non-vanishing macroscopic energy-momentum tensor correlators. This argument is based on the general causal field formalism, which gives a manifestly covariant description of higher spin particles without any reference to gauge redundancy. Our findings are direct consequence of the Poincaré covariance and anlayticity of the Green’s functions and independent of any detailed particle physics model. Further, we discuss the idea that any mechanism causing imbalance between the on-shell production of left- and right-handed fields leads to a helical structure in the energy momentum correlators and violation of the macroscopic parity symmetry. We check our method for fields with spin 12 and show that it correctly reproduces previous results. The formalism, however, suffers from pathologies related to non-localities that appear for massless particles with spin ≥ 1 in flat space. We discuss the origin of these pathologies and the relevance of our findings to cosmology.