Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Quantum and Cosmological Aspects of Antisymmetric Tensors

Sandeep Aashish

IISER, Bhopal

Rank-2 antisymmetric tensors appear in the low energy limit of superstring models, and therefore it is interesting to study their properties in the early universe. In this talk, we present an overview of our studies of the quantum and cosmological aspects of antisymmetric tensor. We use DeWitt-Vilkovisky's covariant effective action approach, which allows for inclusion of quantum gravitational effects in a gauge- and background- independent way, to study its quantization including the case of spontaneous Lorentz violation. As a first step towards studying cosmology, we study the viability of inflation driven by an antisymmetric tensor. We focus on analysing de-Sitter solutions, slow roll conditions and stability of field perturbations in FRW spacetime.