For our journal club next week (Tuesday, 16th of December at 16:00), we'll have a special seminar:
"Inflation then and now" by Pascal M. Vaudrevange (Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland).
How can we reliably determine whether dark energy is given by a cosmological constant or whether the power spectrum of scalar fluctuations is exactly scale invariant?
Is the power spectrum of scalar perturbations exactly scale invariant? Is dark energy a cosmological constant? Or should we allow for a scalar spectral index n_s different from unity or an equation of state of dark energy that varies linearly with red-shift? We propose a method of quantifying (in a Bayesian sense) the degree of doubt about a given model that does not make use of explicit parameterizations of alternative models.
ASC, room 318
