Bootstrapping Inflationary Cosmology

Charlotte Sleight
Faculty of Sciences

Charlotte Sleight is in Marc Henneaux’s Theoretical and mathematical physics Service since October 2016. With her Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant, she will spend two years in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, United States, before coming back for another year in Bruxelles. The project "InflaBoot" is focused on the theory of cosmic inflation. Inflation provides a remarkably successful description of the data extracted so far from observations of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation. However, researchers are currently lacking a concrete realisation of inflation in a fundamental theory of particle physics, while it is almost certain that the inflationary epoch, shortly after the big bang, involved new high energy physics beyond the Standard Model.

InflaBoot aims to derive the theoretical signatures of new high energy physics during inflation, within the cosmic microwave background radiation, in order to improve future observations. Charlotte Sleight will focus specifically on the signatures of higher spin particles, described in string theory -- one of the most promising candidates for a quantum theory of gravity.

End of the project: 30/09/2021

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 793661
Dates
Created on August 6, 2018