Date: 17th October 2022, 16:00

Speaker: Anna Tokareva

Affiliation: Imperial College London

Tencent/VooV Meeting ID: 973-6909-6865

Online Meeting Link: https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/ZGVDkboF0pFP

Abstract:

Gravity can be embedded into a renormalizable theory by means of adding quadratic in curvature terms. However, this at first leads to the presence of the Weyl ghost. It is possible to get rid of this ghost if the locality assumption is weakened and the propagator of the graviton is represented by an entire function of the d'Alembertian operator without new poles and zeros. Models of this type admit a cosmological solution describing the R^2, or Starobinsky, inflation. We study graviton production after inflation in this model and show that it is negligible despite the presence of the higher derivative operators which could potentially cause instabilities.