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Since its discovery by A. Linde and others, cosmic inflation -- exponential expansion of the universe driven by the potential energy contained in an `inflaton' field -- has become a successful paradigm of early universe cosmology and the origin of structure in the universe.   At the same time,  it leads to great theoretical problems which remain unsolved.  This is a paradigm in search of a theory, and SITP members (including Dimopoulos, Kachru, Kallosh, Linde, Senatore, and Silverstein) have led a major upgrade of our understanding of the dynamics of inflation, taking into account the sensitivity of inflationary theory to quantum gravity that follows from the enormous expansion of the universe and range of the inflaton field during the process.  At the same time, SITP theorists discovered an elegant characterization of observables that are captured by low energy quantum fields, and determined precisely how they are constrained by possible symmetries of nature, including a special candidate known as supersymmetry. . . .  (read more)

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Once upon a time, about 13.8 billion years ago, our universe sprang from a quantum speck, ballooning to one million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times its initial volume (by some estimates) in less than a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

Stanford Physicists Xiao-Liang Qi and Leonardo Senatore won New Horizons in Physics Prizes for their outstanding contributions to fundamental physics.

Circumventing a no-go theorem established in 1977 by nonlinearly realized supersymmetry, the authors construct for the first time a pure (without additional fields) N=1 supergravity with positive cosmological constant.

Stanford Event

Friday, March 3, 2017 (All day) to Sunday, March 5, 2017 (All day)
Kavli Auditorium, SLAC & Hewlett Teaching Center, Stanford University

This conference is dedicated to the recent progress in theoretical and observational cosmology, with an emphasis on inflationary cosmology, including its observational status and its implementation in supergravity and string theory.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017 (All day) to Friday, December 8, 2017 (All day)
Varian Physics - Room 355

The Modern Inflationary Cosmology collaboration aims to drive forward our understanding of the theoretical underpinnings and observational consequences of early universe cosmology.  It will undertake a major upgrade of the theory of primordial interactions (non-Gaussianity) and its observational


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