Is Our Universe the Remnant of Chiral Anomaly in Inflation?

Speaker: 
Dr. Azadeh Maleknejad
Institution: 
CERN
Date: 
Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Time: 
11:00 am
Location: 
Zoom Seminar

Abstract: Modern cosmology has been remarkably successful in describing the Universe from a second after the Big Bang until today. However, its physics before that time is still much less certain. It profoundly involves particle theory beyond the Standard Model to explain long-standing puzzles: the origin of the observed matter asymmetry, nature of dark matter, massive neutrinos, and cosmic inflation. In this talk, I will explain that a new framework based on embedding axion-inflation in left-right symmetric gauge extensions of the SM can possibly solve and relate these seemingly unrelated mysteries of modern cosmology. Thus, it can naturally explain the observed coincidences among cosmological parameters. The baryon asymmetry and dark matter today are remnants of a pure quantum effect (chiral anomaly) in inflation which is the source of CP violation in inflation. As a smoking gun, this setup has robust observable signatures for the GW background to be probed by future CMB missions and laser interferometer detectors.

Host: 
Mu-Chun Chen