14 OCTOBER THEORY GROUP SEMINAR

Sarah Shandera, Columbia University

"Fundamental Interactions and Inflation"

Abstract

Inflation may well be one of the highest energy processes we will ever observe. Cosmologists will soon have the observational power to test the fundamental physics of inflation in a very significant way, through measurements of higher order statistics of the primordial curvature perturbations. I will describe the potential impact of these measurements on our understanding of inflation, focusing on single field models, the connection with other UV-sensitive observables, and suggestions from string theory.