Conveners
Cosmology 2
- Brooks Thomas (Lafayette College)
I will describe a scenario in which heavy particles are produced during inflation via their couplings to the inflaton. Following their production, these heavy particles propagate classically and can give rise to localized spots on the CMB. Momentum conservation during particle production dictates that these localized spots come in pairs. I will discuss the properties of such pairwise spots and...
Near-exponential growth during primordial inflation must eventually be followed by big bang nucleosynthesis. The reheating processes that occur in the transition between the two can affect the inflationary power spectrum and dark matter abundance. If the inflaton field is not disrupted by resonance or prompt reheating, perturbations growth gravitationally. I will present the first...
We revisit the renormalizable polynomial inflection point model of inflation, focusing on the small field scenario which can be treated fully analytically. In particular, the running of the spectral index is predicted to be $\alpha = -1.43 \times 10^{-3} +5.56 \times 10^{-5} \left(N_{\rm CMB}-65 \right)$, which might be tested in future. We also analyze reheating through perturbative inflaton...
Despite their incredible precision, both concluded and upcoming CMB missions (such as Planck, CMB-S4, or LiteBIRD) still face several intrinsic limitations that can only be overcome with the help of complementary probes. One particularly interesting avenue to extract more information from the CMB is given by its spectral distortions (SDs). Since these distortions are created whenever the...
