Inflation in String theory and Supergravity

Tuesday 18 Sept 2012, 15:00 → 17:30 Europe/Rome

Aula B. Touschek (Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Via Enrico Fermi 40, Frascati)

ABSTRACT

I will describe various aspects of inflation in supergravity and string theory. In many models of string theory, high energy scale inflation may destabilize vacuum state and make the universe 10 dimensional. There is a very special class of theories where high energy scale inflation does not destabilize vacuum. In the context of such theories, we constructed a broad class of supergravity-based inflationary models, which can describe any possible set of the inflationary parameters n_s and r, as well as small non-gaussianity of the spectrum of cosmological perturbations. This is important because it allows to describe a large variety of observational data in the context of models based on supergravity.