Physics and Astronomy Cosmology Seminar
Marco Peloso, University of Minnesota
Title: "Signatures of Vector Field Production During Inflation"
Abstract: We study the phenomenological limits on inflationary models
due to possible vector field production during inflation. In the first
part of the talk we show that an axion inflaton with a decay constant of
the order of 10^(16) GeV gives rise to a large non-gaussianity of the
primordial perturbations, to observable chiral gravity waves at
interferometers, and to a large amount of primordial black holes. In the
second part of the talk we discuss a different model (first studied by
Ratra in the context of magnetogensis), characterized by a dilation-like
kinetic coupling between the inflaton and a vector field. This model
results in non-gaussianity and broken statistical isotropy of the
primordial perturbations at a level which typically exceeds the
observational bounds.