My paper on scale-invariant inflation with Chiara Cecchini, Mariaveronica De Angelis, William Giarè, and Max Rinaldi, which I previously reported on in an earlier news item, has now officially been published in JCAP! The full bibliographic coordinates for the paper are JCAP 2407 (2024) 058. Here is the link to the paper (which is published Open Access).
Scale-invariant inflation paper accepted in JCAP!
My paper with with with Chiara Cecchini, Mariaveronica De Angelis, William Giarè, and Max Rinaldi, where we tested a theoretically very well-motivated classically scale-invariant inflationary model against current cosmological data (see this earlier news item), has been accepted for publication in JCAP! There were a few minor changes in order to better clarify a few aspects of our analysis, but the results are completely unchanged with respect to the earlier version. You can read the preprint version of the paper on arXiv: 2403.04316.
Journal club/group meetings restart
This afternoon we restarted the journal club tradition for the Theoretical Gravitation and Cosmology group, which basically plays the role of our informal group meetings. Between faculty, visiting faculty, postdocs, PhD students, and MSc students, it was great to see 19 of us in the room (with a couple more yet to join us)! After a quick round of presentations, Max, Chiara, and I presented our scale-invariant inflation paper. One of my next tasks will be to update the group’s website, which is chronically out-of-date. And hopefully I’ll be able to post a group picture soon, once everybody has joined us!
Scale-invariant inflation meets cosmological data
Very happy to see my latest preprint with Chiara Cecchini, Mariaveronica De Angelis, William Giarè, and Max Rinaldi finally out on the arXiv - kudos especially to the three younger collaborators (Chiara, Mariaveronica, and William) who did all the heavy-lifting! We studied a theoretically very well-motivated classically scale-invariant inflationary model, quadratic in curvature and featuring a scalar field non-minimally coupled to gravity, where inflation occurs in the transition between two de Sitter regimes, during which dynamical breaking of scale-invariance occurs and the Planck mass emerges. We show that the model is in excellent agreement with current CMB data, and that it makes a highly testable prediction for the amplitude of primordial tensor modes: r≳0.003. Given its very specific predictions, near-future CMB experiments can therefore make or break scale-invariant inflation - we argued that this, in combination with its strong theoretical motivation, makes the model an interesting benchmark to add when studying future tests of inflation from CMB data. You can read our results in the preprint we just posted on arXiv: 2403.04316.
