AlbaNova Colloquium

Inflation after Planck and BICEP2

by Jan Hamann (CERN)

Europe/Stockholm
Oskar Klein auditorium

Oskar Klein auditorium

Description
Since its introduction more than 30 years ago, the idea of cosmic inflation has been remarkably successful. Inflation not only solves a number of fine-tuning problems, but is also the most convincing candidate for the generating the seeds of cosmic structure. I will briefly recap the generic predictions of the inflationary mechanism, review how they can be tested observationally, and confront them with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) precision data from the Planck experiment. Finally, I will present the recent measurement of the CMB B-polarisation spectrum by the BICEP2 collaboration and discuss its implications for cosmology.

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