Very happy to see my latest preprint with Chiara Cecchini, Mariaveronica De Angelis, William Giarè, and Max Rinaldi finally out on the arXiv - kudos especially to the three younger collaborators (Chiara, Mariaveronica, and William) who did all the heavy-lifting! We studied a theoretically very well-motivated classically scale-invariant inflationary model, quadratic in curvature and featuring a scalar field non-minimally coupled to gravity, where inflation occurs in the transition between two de Sitter regimes, during which dynamical breaking of scale-invariance occurs and the Planck mass emerges. We show that the model is in excellent agreement with current CMB data, and that it makes a highly testable prediction for the amplitude of primordial tensor modes: r≳0.003. Given its very specific predictions, near-future CMB experiments can therefore make or break scale-invariant inflation - we argued that this, in combination with its strong theoretical motivation, makes the model an interesting benchmark to add when studying future tests of inflation from CMB data. You can read our results in the preprint we just posted on arXiv: 2403.04316.
Teaching ends today (for now)
My teaching duties for the autumn semester end today, with the final lecture for the cosmology course focused on deriving the angular power spectrum of CMB temperature anisotropies (a lecture I always particularly enjoy, even though students seem to find it particularly difficult). Unlike the previous semester, this one was much lighter, as I only taught my cosmology course. It was once more very rewarding to interact with a bunch of bright students, whom I really hope enjoyed the course, and whose feedback I look forward to. While the next two months will be devoted to exams (teaching restarts at the end of February), I’ll be able to focus almost entirely on research, with the goal of wrapping up a few papers which are nearly done but just need a final push. So, once more, stay tuned for some interesting work which hopefully will appear in the coming months!