"Inflationary Effects from High Energy Physics"

Although the observed CMB is at very low energy, it encodes ultra high-energy physics in spatial variations of the photon temperature and polarization fluctuations. This effect is believed to be dominated by the initial quantum state of the Universe. I will describe the first theoretical tools by which to construct such a state from fundamental physics. One can then use this technique to reliably calculate corrections to the power spectrum, non-Gaussianity, etc from high-energy physics. We may soon be able to compare these predictions against experiment, allowing one to rule out classes of inflationary models.