Initial conditions and non-minimal coupling of the inflaton

by Prof. Dominik Schwarz (Bielefeld University)

Thursday 25 Feb 2010, 16:00 → 17:15 Europe/Brussels

E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349) (Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve))

It was recently proposed that a non-minimally coupled Higgs field could be the inflaton. In this talk I will first revisit the question why the minimally coupled Higgs field cannot be the inflaton. The answer to that question inspired us to apply the idea of chaotic inflation to a model with two fundamental scales. This leads us to a scenario of "just enough" inflation, in which scale invariance is broken at the largest scales. Another possibility is the already mentioned non-minimal coupling. While non-minimal coupling to the Ricci-curvature has been studied in great detail by others, we recently considered the issue of non-minimal coupling to the Gauss-Bonnet term. It results in a violation of the consistency relation for single field models. It will be shown that such a non-minimal coupling can be tightly constrained by the WMAP data.