Physics Colloquium: Rapid-Turn Multifield Inflation in the Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background Presented by Dr. Sonia Paban - Harvard

Cosmic Inflation is thought to solve several problems in standard Big Bang theory. From a fundamental point of view, many viable inflation models remain despite recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations, which exclude some of the simplest chaotic inflation models. In the next decades, we hope to learn much not only from future CMB experiments but also from space gravitational wave observatories such as LISA. In this talk, I will review the open inflation problems and explain how some inflationary models generate signals contributing to the Stochastic Gravitational-Wave background. Sonia Paban is a high-energy theorist working on early universe physics. She is interested in understanding the effects of many active fields during inflation. Most recently, she has studied the robustness of inflation to inhomogeneous initial conditions and the impact on the power spectrum and non-gaussianity of primordial anisotropy. Paban received her B.S. and doctorate from the Universitat de Barcelona. She was faculty at the University of Texas at Austin from 2000 until 2023. She is currently a Senior Lecturer and a Senior Research Scientist in Physics at Harvard.