DBI in the Sky, and the dS/dS Correspondence

By Eva Silverstein, SLAC, Stanford

The first part of the talk (based on material in collaboration with Alishahiha and Tong) will cover a new mechanism for inflation, which results from strong back reaction on rolling scalar field dynamics near regions with extra light states. This leads to a distinctive non-Gaussian signature in the CMBR, which renders the model observationally falsifiable and distinguishable from traditional slow roll inflation. The second part will cover a new holographic duality for de Sitter space (based on a paper with Alishahiha, Karch, and Tong).