Special Pizza Seminar

Emergent Inflation

Stephon Alexander

Penn State University

It is well appreciated that scalar field driven inflation is plagued with many conceptual and technical problems. In this talk I will present a new model of inflation without the need for a scalar field. Here, inflation emerges from a geodesically complete flat Minkowski background after a fermion condensate self-consistently forms. The model nicely incorporates a graceful exit mechanism. I will discuss what this mechanism might mean for the eternal inflationary paradigm and bouncing universe scenarios. Finally, I will discuss a possible mechanism for generating a scale invariant spectrum of anisotropies.