Classes for the third session of the on-line course Gravity! start on Monday 30th January, for six weeks. You may register here on the FutureLearn platform. The course is free and registration is open to everyone.
D-term supersymmetry breaking in particle physics & cosmology
D-term hybrid inflation is a simple, attractive particle physics framework for realizing inflation. It is however plagued by two serious problems: First, a crucial ingredient of the model is a Fayet-Iliopoulos (FI) term, whose embedding into a UV complete theory raises serious conceptual problems. Second, D-term hybrid inflation produces cosmic strings with a large string tension, in contradiction to the results of CMB experiments. In this talk,