How Sensitive is Inflation to High Energy Physics?

Richard Holman (Carnegie Mellon)

2:30 pm Monday, 7 April 2003

We use a modified hybrid inflation model as a tool to understand whether the CMB temperature anisotropies calculated using inflationary quantum fluctuations is sensitive to physics at energy scales larger than the inflationary scale. We apply the results to the possibility of observing TransPlanckian effects in the CMB.