Searching for primordial features with radio surveys: synergy between the power spectrum and bispectrum

Abstract

We present a comprehensive forecasting framework to assess the detection of primordial oscillatory features by exploiting the synergy between future neutral hydrogen (HI) intensity mapping (IM) surveys and cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements. Focusing on next-generation single-dish (SKAO) and interferometric (HIRAX) radio configurations, we perform a joint analysis of the redshift-space power spectrum and bispectrum, consistently incorporating scale-dependent bias, redshift-space distortions, and non-Gaussian covariance. We investigate phenomenological templates with linear and logarithmic primordial oscillations, together with a physically motivated sharp-feature model. We find that including the large-scale structure bispectrum improves marginalised constraints on feature amplitudes by $30$--$40\%$ relative to the power spectrum alone and helps break parameter degeneracies. In several cases, the bispectrum contains more information on the power-spectrum feature parameters than the power spectrum itself. Much of this gain arises from the late-time gravitational contribution, which inherits the oscillatory structure of the primordial feature signal and acts as an independent source of information. While the CMB angular power spectrum is crucial for constraining low oscillation frequencies, joint interferometric IM analyses ($P+B$) outperform CMB amplitude constraints by up to $75\%$ in the linear regime. We also show that, despite non-Gaussian covariance degrading the independent constraining power of the bispectrum by $55$--$90\%$, the combined HI+CMB probe achieves percent-level precision on the frequency of primordial features, providing a powerful test of non-slow-roll inflation.