ACP Seminar (Astronomy - Cosmology - Particle Physics)

Speaker: Raphael Flauger (IAS / NYU)
Title: Axion Monodromy Inflation and Related Phenomenology
Date (JST): Wed, Feb 15, 2012, 13:30 - 14:30
Place: Seminar Room A
Related File: 632.pdf
Abstract: Inflation is currently the leading paradim for the origin of the structures in the universe we observe today. If the energy scale associated with inflation is near the GUT scale, inflation also leads to detectable primordial gravitational waves. Realizing such high scale models of inflation in string theory has been challenging. I will review the basic ingredients for one proposal for a string theoretic model in which the inflaton can move over a super-Planckian distance. I will present some of the rather rich phenomenology that may arise in these models such as modulations in the power spectrum of scalar perturbations, an interesting shape of non-Gaussianities, as well as quasi-stable field configurations that may form in these models at the end of inflation, called oscillons.
Contact: Watari, Hellerman