Richard Easther
Yale University
Friday, October
24, 2008
4:00 pm in SPL 57
The Observational Fingerprints of Inflation
Abstract: Inflation ensures that the early universe is almost exactly homogeneous and isotropic. However, we know very little about the physical mechanism that drives the inflationary era, and there are many competing proposals. Since inflation renders the early universe almost featureless, the differences between inflationary scenarios are necessarily small, but will be of crucial importance when testing competing models. I will first describe how several key predictions of inflation have been tested and verified by cosmological observations. I will then discuss possible "fingerprints" of specific inflationary models that might be tested by future experiments. These include the detailed form of the primordial perturbation spectrum, gravitational waves (produced both during and after inflation), and primordial fluctuations with non-Gaussian statistics.
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