Speaker
Andrew Long
(Rice University)
Description
This talk is based on a recent paper in which my collaborators and I have explored how the cosmological excess of matter over antimatter can arise through the phenomenon of cosmological gravitational particle production at the end of inflation in a Type-I Seesaw model of nonthermal leptogenesis. From a model-building standpoint, this scenario is appealing for being minimal and economical, since some amount of gravitational production is unavoidable. From the phenomenological perspective, this scenario links the observed baryon asymmetry to the energy scale of inflation and the amplitude of inflationary gravitational waves. A non-detection of $r$ in measurements of CMB polarization would rule out this model.
Author
Andrew Long
(Rice University)