Informal Pizza Seminar

Observing multi-throat brane inflation

Xingang Chen

MIT

We reveiw the multi-throat brane inflation scenario, and compare it to observations using Markov Chain Monte Carlo. The current data cannot distinguish it from the LambdaCDM model, but is able to give interesting constraints on various microscopic parameters of string theory. This includes the mass of the brane moduli potential, the fundamental string scale, the charge or warp factor of throats, and the number of the mobile branes. We quantify some distinctive testable predictions with stringy signatures, such as the large, but regional, running of the spectral index, and the large non-Gaussianity. These results illustrate how we may be able to probe aspects of string theory using cosmological observations.