Session F2 - Focus Session: Phenomenology of Quantum Gravity.
FOCUS session, Saturday evening, April 05
Commonwealth A, Loews Philadelphia Hotel
The standard calculations of scalar and tensor CMBR anisotropies are robust, predictive and in accord with observation. A key assumption is locality at the scale of the inflationary horizon. In this case, we argue that the generic effects of higher-scale physics -- for example, at the string or Planck scale -- arise through leading higher-derivative irrelevant operators in the inflaton Lagrangian. These affect the relationship between the spectrum of scalar and tensor anisotropies in the CMBR.