Talk detail

MG15 - Talk detail

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 Participant

Garcia-Saenz, Sebastian

Institution

Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris  - 98b Boulevard Arago - Paris - Paris - France

Session

EU2

Accepted

Yes

Order

10

Time

18:30 15'

Talk

Oral abstract

Title

Sidetracked Inflation, Orthogonal Non-Gaussianity, and Hyperbolic Field Space
Coauthors Renaux-Petel, Sebastien; Ronayne, John; Tada, Yuichiro

Abstract

Heavy scalar fields can undergo an instability during inflation as a result of their coupling to the inflaton’s kinetic term. This is known as the geometrical destabilization of inflation, as it relies on the negative curvature of the internal field space overcoming the stabilizing force of the potential. Under some assumptions, this instability can drive the system away from its original path in field space into a new inflationary phase, a scenario that we dub "sidetracked inflation". In this talk I will discuss the physical consequences of this second phase of inflation for several two-field nonlinear sigma models, starting with a general description of the background dynamics and explaining how it differs from the standard slow-roll scenarios. I will next describe our results for the cosmological parameters related to the power spectrum and non-Gaussianity, showing that the effects of the destabilized heavy field can be very significant, leading to important modifications in the observable predictions relative to the single-field expectations. In particular, in the case of a hyperbolic field space, this picture of inflation can give rise to large non-Gaussianities characterized by orthogonal shapes in an unusually generic way.

Pdf file

 

Session

AT4

Accepted

Yes

Order

4

Time

16:25 20'

Talk

Oral abstract

Title

A derivation of massive gravity
Coauthors Boulanger, Nicolas; Deffayet, Cedric; Traina, Lucas

Abstract

Cohomological techniques based on BRST symmetry have proved invaluable for classifying consistent deformations of gauge theories. In this talk I will describe the application of this idea to massive field theories, which are made gauge-invariant by the introduction of Stuckelberg fields. As a first application, we start with a Fierz-Pauli graviton on a maximally symmetric space, and show that the BRST-BV method is able to reproduce the consistent cubic vertices of ghost-free massive gravity. The formalism further sheds light on the characterization of Stuckelberg gauge theories, by demonstrating for instance that the gauge algebra of such models is Abelian and that they admit a Born-Infeld type formulation in which the action is simply a combination of gauge-invariant structures.

Pdf file

 

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