Particle Theory Seminar - Beyond Lorentz’s Lamp-post: Amplitude Techniques for Cosmology, Scott Melville, Cambridge

1:30 pm VIA ZOOM

Beyond Lorentz's Lamp-post: Amplitude Techniques for Cosmology

In recent years, a number of powerful techniques have been developed for scattering amplitudes, exploiting fundamental principles like unitarity and causality to place constraints on our effective field theories. However, most of this progress has been confined to Lorentz-invariant systems, and so cannot be applied to condensed matter or cosmology (in which the background spontaneously breaks Lorentz symmetry). In this talk, I will describe how we can import these amplitude techniques to systems without Lorentz symmetry, and in particular how they impact the Effective Field of Theory of inflation, identifying a region of parameter space in which unitarity/causality guarantees new physics beyond single-field, weakly coupled inflation.

Event Type

Seminars

May 12