Testing Inflation with Dark Matter Halos
  Cosmic inflation provides a mechanism for generating the early density
perturbations that seeded the large-scale structures we see today. Primordial
non-Gaussianity is among the most promising of few observational tests of
physics at this epoch. At present non-Gaussianity is best constrained by the
cosmic microwave background, but in the near term large-scale structure data
may be competitive so long as the effects of primordial non-Gaussianity can be
modeled through the non-linear process of structure formation. We discuss
recent work modeling effects of a few types of primordial non-Gaussianity on
the large-scale halo clustering and the halo mass function. More specifically,
we compare analytic and N-body results for two variants of the curvaton model
of inflation: (i) a "tauNL" scenario in which the curvaton and inflaton
contribute equally to the primordial curvature perturbation and (ii) a "gNL"
model where the usual quadratic fNL term in the potential cancels, but a large
cubic term remains.
