Abstracts

Alexey Koshelev

Early Universe cosmology in non-local gravity theories and its observational signatures

Non-local gravity theories including theories with non-local matter provide a challenging opportunity to explain the early Universe without introducing a cosmological singularity. In particular one can easily embed the inflation in the non-local gravity framework. Even though the setup is way different from standard local models of inflation (say R^2 gravity or Einstein's gravity with a scalar field with an exponential flat potential) the observational predictions stay the same as long as we demand some natural restrictions on the behavior of our model. In fact it poses a challenge to find out how to distinguish these models from canonical inflation candidates. In my talk I will explain what are these natural restrictions, why are they indeed natural to be, and how one can find real physical signatures of non-local gravity such that the model can be supported or falsified.

On the way to these results I will do a quick introduction to the subject including the explanation how such models may arise from the String Field Theory or from the p-adic String Theory.