HEP Theory Journal Club

Vector field phenomenology during inflation

Ryo Namba

McGill

In this talk, I would like to survey my area of research, as I am a new postdoc who recently joined Robert Brandenberger's group. I plan to discuss several of my past works and some ongoing ones, focusing on the main ideas without going into details.

In many inflationary models, the dynamics of scalar fields has been studied extensively. On the other hand, vector fields are naturally present, and their interactions with scalars and/or themselves can potentially affect the observable quantities as well as the inflationary dynamics. I introduce models of various couplings of U(1) and non-Abelian gauge fields to scalars and pseudo-scalars, and discuss how they can produce observable effects, such as gravitational waves, magnetic fields and non-Gaussianity of scalar perturbations.