Stochastic Inflation

by Prof. Kerstin Kunze (Universidad de Salamanca)

Thursday 6 May 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))

Since its first proposal nearly 30 years ago inflation has become the paradigm to describe the very early evolution of the universe. In the standard inflationary picture the expansion of the universe is driven by the potential energy density of a scalar field whose fluctuations eventually provide the seeds for structure formation. In the stochastic approach to inflation the dynamics of the quantum to classical transition of the fluctuations of the scalar field is effectively described by a classical noise term. The implications of this stochastic description on global scales are explored as well as its effect on observational quantities such as the spectral index of the primordial density perturbations.