Inflation: Where Do We Stand?

In this short review, the predictions of inflation are presented and compared to the most recent measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy. It is argued that inflation is compatible with these observations but that these ones are not yet accurate enough to probe the details of the scenario.Comment: 7 pages, no figure, Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Non-Perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics, June 7-11, 2004, Pari

On the Reliability of the Langevin Pertubative Solution in Stochastic Inflation

A method to estimate the reliability of a perturbative expansion of the stochastic inflationary Langevin equation is presented and discussed. The method is applied to various inflationary scenarios, as large field, small field and running mass models. It is demonstrated that the perturbative approach is more reliable than could be naively suspected and, in general, only breaks down at the very end of inflation.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Interactions and charge fractionalization in an electronic Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer

We consider an electronic analog of the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interferometer, where two single electrons travel along opposite chiral edge states and collide at a Quantum Point Contact. Studying the current noise, we show that because of interactions between co-propagating edge states, the degree of indistinguishability between the two electron wavepackets is dramatically reduced, leading to reduced contrast for the HOM signal. This decoherence phenomenon strongly depends on the energy resolution of the packets. Insofar as interactions cause charge fractionalization, we show that charge and neutral modes interfere with each other, leading to satellite dips or peaks in the current noise. Our calculations explain recent experimental results [E. Bocquillon, et al., Science 339, 1054(2013)] where an electronic HOM signal with reduced contrast was observed.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Birefringent Gravitational Waves and the Consistency Check of Inflation

In this work we show that the gravitational Chern-Simons term, aside from being a key ingredient in inflationary baryogenesis, modifies super-horizon gravitational waves produced during inflation. We compute the super-Hubble gravitational power spectrum in the slow-roll approximation and show that its overall amplitude is modified while its spectral index remains unchanged (at leading order in the slow-roll parameters). Then, we calculate the correction to the tensor to scalar ratio, T/S. We find a correction of T/S which is dependent on $\cal{N}$ (more precisely quadratic in ${\cal N}$), the parameter characterizing the amplitude of the Chern-Simons terms. In a stringy embedding of the leptogenesis mechanism, $\cal{N}$ is the ratio between the Planck scale and the fundamental string scale. Thus, in principle, we provide a direct probe of leptogenesis due to stringy dynamics in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). However, we demonstrate that the corresponding correction of T/S is in fact very small and not observable in the regime where our calculations are valid. To obtain a sizable effect, we argue that a non-linear calculation is necessary.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure, RevTe

Compressed intramolecular dispersion interactions.

The feasibility of the compression of localized virtual orbitals is explored in the context of intramolecular long-range dispersion interactions. Singular value decomposition (SVD) of coupled cluster doubles amplitudes associated with the dispersion interactions is analyzed for a number of long-chain systems, including saturated and unsaturated hydrocarbons and a silane chain. Further decomposition of the most important amplitudes obtained from these SVDs allows for the analysis of the dispersion-specific virtual orbitals that are naturally localized. Consistent with previous work on intermolecular dispersion interactions in dimers, it is found that three important geminals arise and account for the majority of dispersion interactions at the long range, even in the many body intramolecular case. Furthermore, it is shown that as few as three localized virtual orbitals per occupied orbital can be enough to capture all pairwise long-range dispersion interactions within a molecule

First CMB Constraints on the Inflationary Reheating Temperature

We present the first Bayesian constraints on the single field inflationary reheating era obtained from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data. After demonstrating that this epoch can be fully characterized by the so-called reheating parameter, we show that it is constrained by the seven years Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropies Probe (WMAP7) data for all large and small field models. An interesting feature of our approach is that it yields lower bounds on the reheating temperature which can be combined with the upper bounds associated with gravitinos production. For large field models, we find the energy scale of reheating to be higher than those probed at the Large Hadron Collider, Ereh > 17.3 TeV at 95% of confidence. For small field models, we obtain the two-sigma lower limits Ereh > 890 TeV for a mean equation of state during reheating = -0.3 and Ereh > 390 GeV for = -0.2. The physical origin of these constraints is pedagogically explained by means of the slow-roll approximation. Finally, when marginalizing over all possible reheating history, the WMAP7 data push massive inflation under pressure (p < 2.2 at 95% of confidence where p is the power index of the large field potentials) while they slightly favor super-Planckian field expectation values in the small field models.Comment: 18 pages, 15 figures, uses RevTeX. References added, matches published versio