MG11 
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Abstract

Supersonic Inflation

It is well known that in manifestly Lorentz invariant theories with nontrivial kinetic terms, perturbations around some classical backgrounds can travel faster than light. These exotic "supersonic" models may have interesting consequences for cosmology and astrophysics.In particular, one can show that in such theories the contribution of the gravitational waves to the CMB fluctuations can be substantially larger than that in standard inflationary models. This increase of the tensor-to-scalar perturbation ratio leads to a larger B-component of the CMB polarization, thus making the prospects for future detection much more promising. The other important consequence of the considered model is a higher energy scale of inflation and hence higher reheating temperature compared to a simple inflation. Finally I will discuss causality and stability of these models.

Looking beyond the horizon

We show that if there exists a special kind of Born-Infeld type scalar field, then one can send information from inside a black hole. This information is encoded in perturbations of the field propagating in non-trivial scalar field backgrounds, which serves as a "new ether". Although the theory is Lorentz-invariant it allows, nevertheless, the superluminal propagation of perturbations with respect to the "new ether". We found the stationary solution for background, which describes the accretion of the scalar field onto a black hole. Examining the propagation of small perturbations around this solution we show that the signals emitted inside the horizon can reach an observer located outside the black hole. Thus the accreting field forms a hydrodynamical analog of a black hole whose horizon is inside of the gravitational black hole drawing in the scalar field.