Event

The phenomenon of cosmological gravitational particle production (CGPP) occurs during and after inflation as quantum fields “feel” the cosmological expansion are excited out of their ground state.  CGPP is a compelling and minimal explanation for the origin of dark matter, which might only interact gravitationally, as well as other cosmological relics.  In this talk, I’ll provide a general introduction to CGPP and then focus on our recent study of CGPP for massive spin-2 particles.  I’ll briefly discuss the embedding of massive spin-2 particles into the framework of bigravity, present our results for the spectrum of gravitationally produced particles, and discuss a related by-product of our analysis: an FRW-generalization of the Higuchi bound (ghost-avoidance of massive gravity on dS backgrounds).