Gravitational Physics
Breaking inflation with inhomogeneous initial conditions
Speaker: Katy Cough (King's College London)
Date: Friday 25 November 2016
Time: 11.15
Venue: Chart Room (N/3.23)
Inflation is proposed as a means of explaining why the Universe is currently so homogeneous on larger scales, solving both the horizon and flatness problems in early universe cosmology. However, if inflation itself requires homogeneous conditions to get started, this rather defeats the point of it! Most work up until now has focussed on a dynamical systems approach to classifying the stability of inflationary models, but recently numerical GR models have been used to simulate the actual evolution of the inflaton field, leading to new insights. I will describe a recent work (https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.04408) in which we considered the robustness of generic small and large field inflationary models to initial inhomogeneities in the field and the extrinsic curvature of the metric.