Joint cosmology seminar at Tufts:

Tuesday, February 6, 2018, 2:30 pm
574 Boston Ave, Room 310
Tufts University
Refreshments at 2:00 outside room 304

Effective field theory for axion monodromy inflation

Albion Lawrence
Brandeis

Abstract:

Axion monodromy inflation was first developed in the context of string models in order to evade apparent constraints on inflation with super-Planckian field ranges. In this talk I will describe the general effective field theory for these models, in terms of a massive tensor gauge field, which highlights how slow-roll inflation is protected from a wide class of quantum gravity corrections. Current bounds on CMB tensor modes push the theory into a strongly-coupled regime, which has two phases consistent with observation: standard slow-roll inflation with a flattened potential, or a variant of ``k-flation'' in which lowering the tensor power is correlated with enhanced non-Gaussianity.