Gravitational waves and large field inflation

Abstract

According to the famous Lyth bound, one can confirm large field inflation by finding tensor modes with sufficiently large tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$. Here we will try to answer two related questions: Is it possible to rule out all large field inflationary models by not finding tensor modes with $r$ above some critical value, and what can we say about the scale of inflation by measuring $r$? However, in order to answer these questions one should distinguish between two different definitions of the large field inflation and three different definitions of the scale of inflation. We will examine these issues using the theory of cosmological $\alpha$-attractors as a convenient testing ground.

6 pages, 1 figure

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• Inflationary $\alpha$-attractor cosmology: A global dynamical systems perspective
• Foreground Separation and Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves with the PICO Space Mission
• Reconstruction of extended inflationary potentials for attractors
• Energy Density, Temperature and Entropy Dynamics in Perturbative Reheating
• Cosmology using numerical relativity
• Robustness of inflation to kinetic inhomogeneities
• Lyth Bound, eternal inflation and future cosmological missions
• Large and small field inflation from hyperbolic sigma models
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• Setting Initial Conditions for Inflation with Reaction-Diffusion Equation
• The Upper Bound on the Tensor-to-Scalar Ratio Consistent with Quantum Gravity
• On the computational feasibility of Bayesian end-to-end analysis of LiteBIRD simulations within Cosmoglobe
• Sequestered Inflation