Bayesian measurements of inflation with additional fields

Dates

2018-10-23 16:00
Dates
2018-10-23 16:00

Localisation / Location

Salle / Local

646 A - Mondrian

Orateur/Orator

Robert Hardwick

Affiliation

Portsmouth University

Equipe(s) organisatrice(s) / Organizing team(s)

In this talk I will demonstrate how, by introducing additional scalar degrees of freedom, one can measure properties of the inflationary era which may be otherwise inaccessible. Using two explicit examples (the curvaton and a feebly interacting model of dark matter), which introduce new informative priors into the post-inflationary phenomenology, we are able to constrain either the total duration that inflation takes place or its energy scale independently of the tensor-to-scalar ratio. Measurements of this kind may prove crucial in advancing the study of inflation if the future observational data were to yield a limited amount of new information.