Asymptotically safe cosmology – a status report [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1702.04137


Asymptotic Safety, based on a non-Gaussian fixed point of the gravitational renormalization group flow, provides an elegant mechanism for completing the gravitational force at sub-Planckian scales. At high energies the fixed point controls the scaling of couplings such that unphysical divergences are absent while the emergence of classical low-energy physics is linked to a crossover between two renormalization group fixed points. These features make Asymptotic Safety an attractive framework for cosmological model building. The resulting scenarios may naturally give rise to a quantum gravity driven inflationary phase in the very early universe and an almost scale-free fluctuation spectrum. Moreover, effective descriptions arising from an renormalization group improvement permit a direct comparison to cosmological observations as, e.g. Planck data.

Read this paper on arXiv…

A. Bonanno and F. Saueressig
Wed, 15 Feb 17
46/47

Comments: Invited review for the special issue “Testing quantum gravity with cosmology” to appear in Compte Rendus Physique A