Joint cosmology seminar at Tufts:

Tuesday, April 3, 2018, 2:30 pm
574 Boston Ave, Room 310
Tufts University
Refreshments at 2:00 outside room 304

Phenomenology of vector and fermion production during axion inflation

Lorenzo Sorbo
UMass Amherst

Abstract:

In this talk, after quickly reviewing the virtues of axion-like inflatons, I will discuss how a derivative coupling of a pseudoscalar inflaton to vector and to fermions fields can amplify significantly the mode functions of such degrees of freedom which, in their turn, can lead to a very rich, parity-violating, phenomenology. The amplification of the vector modes shows up as an exponentially large occupation number at scales of the order of the inflationary Hubble scale, whereas in the case of fermions one can have a sizable occupation number up to very high energies. This difference implies that fermion and vector production have a very different phenomenology.