Name: Damien Easson
 Institution: Arizona State U. and University of Tokyo
 Title: Fundamental physics of inflation and CMB observations
 Key Words: inflation, cosmic microwave background
 Abstract: Many microphysical models of inflation predict essentially the same values for macrophysical observables. This degeneracy problem implies it will be difficult to convincingly 
reconstruct the fundamental inflaton Lagrangian through measurements of primordial
cosmological perturbations alone, even with significantly improved data and experimental
technology. We discuss the severity of this degeneracy by studying the simple case of single field inflationary models with a curvaton field. We will discuss the
significance of detection
of non--Gaussianity, primordial gravitational waves or isocurvature modes. We
will also discuss the need to 
advance our fundamental understanding of the mechanism 
behind the source of the perturbations in order to identify specific features of the underlying Lagrangian.