Informal Pizza Seminar

String Compactification and Brane Inflation

Gary Shiu

University of Wisconsin-Madison

A goal of string cosmology is to construct and study well motivated inflationary scenarios from string theory and look for distinctive observational signatures. Brane inflation which realizes inflation in a geometrical way as the motion of D-branes through compact space, can connect cosmology and extra dimensions in interesting ways. I will discuss some recent work in which details of the geometry of warped throats in string theory affect important aspects of inflation such as the spectrum of primordial perturbations.