Lecture by Ariel Zhitnitsky, 2018 CAP-CRM Prize Recipient

2018 CAP-CRM Prize winner Ariel Zhitnitsky (UBC)

ABSTRACT : I discuss a new scenario for early cosmology when the inflationary de Sitter phase emerges dynamically. This genuine quantum effect occurs as a result of dynamics of the topologically nontrivial sectors in a strongly coupled non-abelian gauge theory in an expanding universe. I argue that the key element for this idea to work is the presence of nontrivial holonomy in strongly coupled gauge theories. The effect is global in nature, non-analytical in coupling constant, and cannot be formulated in terms of a gradient expansion in an effective local field theory. I explain the basic ideas of this framework using a simplified 2D quantum field theory where precise computations can be carried out in theoretically controllable way. I move on to generalize the computations to 4D non-abelian gauge field theories. The last (and most important for cosmological applications) part of my talk is based on recent paper [arXiv:1709.09671].