Running in the early Universe UV sensitivity of single-field inflationary models

Open Access
Authors
Supervisors
Cosupervisors
Award date 25-10-2018
ISBN
  • 9789463800419
Number of pages 201
Organisations
  • Faculty of Science (FNWI) - Institute of Physics (IoP) - Institute for Theoretical Physics Amsterdam (ITFA)
  • Faculty of Science (FNWI) - Institute of Physics (IoP) - Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEF)
Abstract
This work explores the intriguing possibility of connecting present-day particle physics measurements to observations of the sky, coming from satellites and telescopes, which carry information on the primordial Universe.
The inflationary paradigm, which assume an exponential expansion of our Universe in its early stage, relates the features of the Cosmic Microwave Background to the quantum fluctuations produced during inflation. However, the typical energy scales at which inflation took place are many orders of magnitude above those probed with collider physics. This raises the questions: can we consistently extrapolate physics from one to the other regime? Can the predictions be sensitive to the unknown physics in between these two scales?
We consider different types of single field inflationary models, with special emphasis on Higgs inflation-type, discussing their unitarity and renormalizability properties. Even if our purpose was minimality, once the quantum nature of a model is taken into account new physics is demanded. As a matter of fact, to consistently connect the low and high energy regimes of the effective field theories (described in terms of Standard model and inflationary parameters respectively), some threshold corrections are needed. We parametrize these threshold corrections, compute the running of the couplings in the inflationary regime and show under which circumstances the observables are sensitive or insensitive to this new type of UV effect.
Document type PhD thesis
Note Please note that the thesis version of the acknowledgements section is not included in the thesis download. An extended version of the acknowledgements is available as a separate download.
Language English
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