RTG Seminar by Dr. Adriana Menkara
12.12.2025The next seminar for our Research Training Group will be on December 18 at 3:45 p.m. The speaker is Dr. Adriana Menkara from DESY.
Dr. Adriana Menkara
Title: Models of inflation at the pole
18. December 2025 - Physik West SE 22.00.0177 - 3:45 p.m.
α-attractors are a broad class of inflationary models whose predictions do not change even if one significantly modifies the inflationary potential. The attractor properties stem from the presence of a non-minimal coupling to gravity in the Jordan frame, which then translates to a non-canonical kinetic term in the Einstein frame. Non-minimal couplings are ubiquitous in inflationary models, including Starobinsky and Higgs inflation. I'll start by reviewing the original models and then, by taking the conformal limit, we arrive at a class of models that we dub inflation at the pole, that can be realized for any scalar field, such as the SM Higgs or the Peccei-Quinn field responsible for the QCD axion.
