Kodosky Lecture Series

Dr. Tom Banks, Rutgers University

"HST and Inflationary Cosmology"

HST provides us with a mathematically well defined version of inflationary cosmology, which has no fine tuning of initial conditions beyond that necessary to have ANY local excitations in the universe. Inflationary horizon volumes come into the horizon of a given time-like trajectory as black holes. The black holes are finite quantum systems and fluctuations in their mass and angular momentum produce the post-inflationary fluctuation spectrum. The spectrum of fluctuations is approximately SO(1,4) invariant if there are many e-folds of inflation, but the model relates the number of e-folds of inflation to the future asymptotic cosmological constant. The formulae for fluctuations in terms of the slow roll FRW metric differ from those in field theoretic inflation models, but in the scalar fluctuations this can be masked by the choice of the otherwise unconstrained slow roll metric. Tensor fluctuations are predicted to be small, and have a distinctly different spectrum than field theory models. Non-Gaussianity is also small, but the tensor non-Gaussianity has a very different structure than any field theory model.

11:00am, RLM 9.222