Recent advancements in fundamental physics

Recent experimental discoveries...

• 2016: Discovery of gravitational waves,
• 2013: Discovery of SM Higgs boson,
• 1990-2015: Establishing the SM of cosmology,
• 1998: Discovery of late time acceleration of the Universe,
• Evidence in favour of existence of Cold Dark Matter,
• 1995: Top quark,
• Neutrino masses.

Recent (last 40 years) major theoretical advancements...

• Mid 2010s: Amplitudes;
• Early 2000s: Moduli stabilisation in string theory,
• 1997: Dualities in general and AdS/CFT correspondence in particular,
• Mid 1990s: Microscopic calculation of entropy of BHs,
• Early 1980s: Cosmic inflation.

Some recent papers about inflationary cosmology

The Scale Factor Potential Approach to Inflation

David Benisty, Eduardo I. Guendelman, Emmanuel N. Saridakis

(Submitted on 4 Sep 2019)

We propose a new approach to investigate inflation in a model-independent way, and in particular to elaborate the involved observables, through the introduction of the "scale factor potential". Through its use one can immediately determine the inflation end, which corresponds to its first (and global) minimum. Additionally, we express the inflationary observables in terms of its logarithm, using as independent variable the e-folding number. After showing how the above procedure works in the case of Starobinsky inflation, we apply it in order to reconstruct physical scalar-field potentials that can generate any desirable inflationary observables. As an example, we construct a new class of scalar potentials that can lead to the desired spectral index and tensor-to-scalar ratio, in agreement with observations.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01982