Limits on perturbative treatment for inflationary potentials & its meaning for recision cosmology

Title: Limits on perturbative treatment for inflationary potentials and what does it mean for the next stage of precision cosmology.

In this talk we briefly discuss the notion of slow-roll inflation, and the mechanism with which it creates the structure of the observed universe. We outline the problem of inferring inflationary potentials from the shape of the primordial power spectrum (PPS), which in itself is a statistical inference from the shape of the matter power spectrum.

We then present some of the methods and heuristics used in building models of inflation, and show that in the age of precision cosmology, they are insufficient. We argue that our current employed statistical and theoretical methods effectively smooth over features in the PPS, which may be crucial for our understanding of high energy physics.

Finally, we comment on the confidence limits of the theoretical methods in model building, and argue that for some classes of inflationary models, no analytic approximation using the current tools may be feasible.

This talk is based on arxiv:2110.10557

Note: Ira is a candidate for the department. Anyone interested in meeting with him can mark themselves here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KATnuOMVFMd3kUxxTpiNJhJYWZnZSSY…