Asymptotically safe cosmology - A status report

Abstract

Asymptotic safety, based on a non-Gaussian fixed point of the gravitational renormalization group flow, provides an elegant mechanism for completing the gravitational force at sub-Planckian scales. At high energies, the fixed point controls the scaling of couplings such that unphysical divergences are absent, while the emergence of classical low-energy physics is linked to a crossover between two renormalization group fixed points. These features make asymptotic safety an attractive framework for the building of a cosmological model. The resulting scenarios may naturally give rise to a quantum-gravity-driven inflationary phase in the very early universe and an almost scale-free fluctuation spectrum. Moreover, effective descriptions arising from an improvement of the renormalization group permit a direct comparison to cosmological observations as, e.g., Planck data.