Escher in the Sky

By R. Kallosh, Andrei Linde. Comptes rendus. Physique, 2015

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We give a brief review of the history of inflationary theory and then concentrate on the recently discovered set of inflationary models called cosmological α-attractors. These models provide an excellent fit to the latest observational data. Their predictions n s ≈ 1 − 2 / N and r ≈ 12 α / N 2 are very robust with respect to the modifications of the inflaton potential. An intriguing interpretation of α-attractors is based on a geometric moduli space with a boundary: a Poincare disk model of a hyperbolic geometry with the radius 3 α , beautifully represented by the Escher's picture Circle Limit IV. In such models, the amplitude of the gravitational waves is proportional to the square of the radius of the Poincare disk.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/218955a9325e0256e4965e2d0af13064ed067649

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Citations in the corpus

Dark energy, α-attractors, and large-scale structure surveys (2017, background): “On a purely phenomenological level, the main features of all of these models can be represented in terms of a single-field model with the Lagrangian [50, 51]”
α-attractors: Planck, LHC and dark energy (2015, methodology): “2) where T = 1+Z 1−Z , T −1 = 1−Z 1+Z [7, 10, 14].”
Cosmological attractors and initial conditions for inflation (2015, methodology): “On a purely phenomenological level, the main features of inflation in all of these models can be represented in terms of a single-field toy model with the Lagrangian [14, 15]”
Hyperbolic geometry of cosmological attractors (2015, background): “We have already emphasized in [6] that these models can be associated with the hyperbolic geometry of the Poincaré disk or half-plane, and the corresponding Möbius symmetry of the scalar kinetic terms.”