04.06.2009 (Thursday)

Stringy modifications to spacetime structure and the CMB

Regular Seminar Subodh Patil (Humboldt University)

at:
14:00 IC
room H503
abstract:

In this talk, we will review recent work which asks the question, what, if any effects stringy modifications to geometry might have on the predictions of inflation? We couch our discussion within two well motivated frameworks-- non-commutative geometry (likely to be present during brane inflation), and modifications to mode propagation coming from a field theory representation of the stringy uncertainty principle. In the former case, we find that UV/IR mode mixing can imprint potentially observable signatures onto the CMB independent of the scale of inflation. In the latter case, we analytically compute corrections, and comment on the possibility of observing these in the fortunate circumstance that we happen to find ourselves in a weakly coupled corner of moduli space.