Nov 12 – 15, 2013
Pagoda Hotel & Restaurant
Pacific/Honolulu timezone

On Model-Dependence in String Inflation

Nov 13, 2013, 3:35 PM
25m
C'est Si Bon - Makai room (Pagoda Hotel & Restaurant)

C'est Si Bon - Makai room

Pagoda Hotel & Restaurant

oral Cosmology Cosmology I

Speaker

Dr Sean Downes (Leung Center for Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics)

Description

This year the Planck Collaboration has ruled out many models of inflation that would have informed us of new physics. The models which survived the data release are fairly close to vanilla: single-field inflation with a nearly Gaussian, slightly redshifted spectrum. Well-studied scenarios in the string inflation context include inflection point inflation and the Starobinsky-like models. We report on searches for model independent predictions for inflation in the context of these string models. In particular, we examine how these scenarios can provide an explanation of the low power at large scales anomaly which persists in the CMB data. We present a general mechanism for this phenomena in term the "slow-roll" paradigm, and explain to what extent this can provide information about the UV physics. We point out a striking similarity between the these and comment about its implications for string inflation models and the study of inflation in general.

Primary author

Dr Sean Downes (Leung Center for Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics)

Co-author

Dr Bhaskar Dutta (Texas A&M university)

Presentation materials