Lauren Pearce "Phenomenology of Fermion Production During Inflation"

Thursday 22 Mar 2018, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/Amsterdam

Nikhef

While the production of bosons during inflation has received substantial attention, the production of fermions has often been neglected. Fermions can be produced via a derivative coupling in axion inflation, and can source primordial perturbations in the inflaton via their backreaction. I will discuss recent calculations of this contribution to the CMB power spectrum and non-gaussianity, with the remarkable result that there is a regime in which the effect of the fermions gives a dominant contribution to the power spectrum without violating non-gaussianity limits.