Power Suppression at Large Scales with String Inflation Models

by Sean Downes (Texas A&M University)

Tuesday Sep 10, 2013, 3:00 PM → 4:00 PM Pacific/Honolulu

420 (WAT)

Planck 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. Two popular scenarios which have survived are inflection point inflation and the Starobinsky model. We examine how both 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 two scenarios and comment about its implications for string inflation models and the study of inflation in general.