Speaker
David Edwards
(Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Description
Recently, there has been a large amount of work considering theories of inflation which lead to a common observational prediction - the Universal Attractors.
I will present the attractor structure in the case of the strong, non-minimal coupling to gravity variety of these models, identifying a shift of the attractor from the expected Starobinsky point and determining conditions for approach to the attractor.
The observational position of these models will then be assessed with particular emphasis on the restraints future observations of primordial B-modes may be able to place on the non-minimal coupling to gravity.
Finally, after the departure from the original prediction in the case of the single field model I will present some ideas on a multi-field extension, showing that the current simple interpretation of how the fields move through field space during inflation does not appear to be all that is required in explaining the phenomenology of such models.
