Non-gaussianities and the Inflationary Initial State – Andrew Tolley
Date: Fri. February 19th, 2010, 11:30 am-12:30 pmLocation: Rockefeller 221
The potential discovery of primordial non-gaussianities would revolutionize our understanding of early universe cosmology, giving a whole new perspective on the physics responsible for inflation. I will review the different possible physical mechanisms that can give rise to non-gaussianities, and discuss in detail those which are distinctive in telling us about the inflationary quantum state. In particular, I will show how consistency conditions coming from effective field theory can be used to constrain the level of non-gaussianity that we can hope to observe in future data.