Conveners
Cosmology 1
- Rouzbeh Allahverdi (University of New Mexico)
A minimal model allowing for the stage of accelerated expansion in the early Universe is inlation driven by the Standard model Higgs field. However, this model requires large non-minimal coupling between the Higgs field and gravity. This leads to quite low energy scale after which the model becomes strongly coupled and non-predictive. In particular, UV completion of Higgs inflation is required...
Without any extension of the MSSM, we build the model of inflation in which the inflaton field is a scalar component of the MSSM state(s).
The inflaton protential involves only MSSM Yukawa superpotential couplings, which make considered model very predictive, establishing close connection between the cosmology and particle physics.
The values of the scalar spectral index and the...
Models of inflation with multiple scalar fields are well-motivated from supergravity and string theory. However, the steep potential gradients often seen in these models naively violate the slow-roll criteria employed in single-field inflation. Multi-field solutions that rapidly turn in field space can achieve sustained slow-roll inflation in such models, but criteria for turning trajectories...
Quintessential inflation aims to explain both inflation and dark energy using a single degree of freedom in a common theoretical framework. This economic proposal explains away the coincidence problem of quintessence by means of the inflationary attractor. Model building quintessential inflation is rather difficult because a successful model must account for both inflation and dark energy...
Modern cosmology has been remarkably successful in describing the Universe from a second after the Big Bang until today. However, its physics before that time is still much less certain. It profoundly involves particle theory beyond the Standard Model to explain long-standing puzzles: the origin of the observed matter asymmetry, nature of dark matter, massive neutrinos, and cosmic inflation....
Recently there has been increasing interest in alternate methods to compute quantum tunneling in field theory. Of particular interest is a stochastic approach which involves (i) sampling from the free theory Gaussian approximation to the Wigner distribution in order to obtain stochastic initial conditions for the field and momentum conjugate, then (ii) evolving under the classical field...
