Cliff Burgess, Physics & Astronomy, has won a second Buchalter Cosmology Prize, placing third for the second time in two years. Working with Physics & Astronomy Ph.D. candidate, Peter Hayman, and collaborators from the University of Illinois, CERN, and the Niels Bohr Institute, the group was recognized for their paper, “Magnon Inflation: Slow Roll With Deep Potentials”. Burgess and Hayman are also both associated with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.

The judging committee recognized the 2017 work as “an insightful and systematic treatment of the effective field theory of multiple scalar fields leading to inflationary dynamics dominated by terms with a single time derivative, breaking Lorentz invariance and revealing novel ways to satisfy the relevant slow roll condition.”

Established in 2014, the Buchalter Cosmology Prize recognizes “new ideas or discoveries that have the potential to produce a breakthrough advance in our understanding of the origin, structure, and evolution of the universe”. Burgess won third prize for his paper, “EFT Beyond the Horizon: Stochastic Inflation and How Primordial Quantum Fluctuations Go Classical” in 2016.