PIRSA:14100119 Scientific Series Cosmology

DOI10.48660/14100119

Series: Cosmology and Gravitation

(2014). Beyond slow-roll - Daan Meerburg. Perimeter Institute. https://pirsa.org/14100119

Beyond slow-roll - Daan Meerburg. Perimeter Institute, Oct. 28, 2014, https://pirsa.org/14100119 

@misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:14100119,
  doi = {10.48660/14100119},
  url = {https://pirsa.org/14100119},
  author = {},
  keywords = {Cosmology},
  language = {en},
  title = {Beyond slow-roll - Daan Meerburg},
  publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
  year = {2014},
  month = {oct},
  note = {PIRSA:14100119 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
}

Abstract

We live in exciting times for cosmologists. There is a plethora of cosmological experiments that allow us to reconstruct the earliest moments in the Universe and test our ideas on how the Universe came into existence. Current data appear to favor an inflationary model that produces adiabatic, scale free, Gaussian fluctuations with an amplitude of 10^-5 in units of mK. WIthin the realm of cosmological models, it appears that such conditions are easily accomplished if we have a single light field slowly rolling down its potential. In this talk, I will investigate the possibility to what extend our current observations would allow for a deviation from slow-roll: several class of models predicts that the fluctuation spectra will contain superimposed features on top of their slow-roll solution. I will discuss these models and explain a novel way of extract these features from the data, both in the power spectrum as well as in the bispectrum. I will give the latest constraints from current cosmological surveys. In light of the possible detection of primordial gravitational waves, I will show that there exists evidence (3 sigma) that the data prefer a long wavelength feature driven by axion monodromy, a model that naturally predicts large tensor modes. From this I will derive a constraint on the axion decay constant. I will conclude with a discussion on how observations of higher order statistics and large scale structure could further constrain these models.

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