Tuesdays 10:30 - 11:30 | Fridays 11:30 - 12:30
Showing votes from 2015-10-02 12:30 to 2015-10-06 11:30 | Next meeting is Tuesday Jul 7th, 10:30 am.
We show the existence of a general mechanism by which heavy scalar fields can be destabilized during inflation. It relies on the fact that the effective mass of fluctuations orthogonal to the inflationary direction contains a contribution proportional to the curvature tensor of the field space metric, and that it can render the entropic fluctuations tachyonic. We describe a simple and rather universal setup in which apparently benign higher-order operators trigger this instability. This phenomenon can prematurely end inflation and have important observational consequences, sometimes excluding models that would otherwise perfectly fit the data. More generally, it modifies the interpretation of cosmological constraints in terms of fundamental physics.
Numerical evidence suggests that the superradiant instability of Kerr-AdS black holes and "black resonators" evolves to smaller and smaller scales towards a "limiting" black resonator. Using $AdS_4$ supergravity, we argue that this putative endpoint to the superradiant instability does not exist.