The data release of BICEP2 a couple of weeks ago caused much excitement in the physics community and justly so. First of all we were able to detect gravitational waves for the first time, albeit not directly. These gravitational waves were produced in a very early stage of our universe, as predicted by the inflationary paradigm, which in turn gets an important observational confirmation. Although we need confirmation from other experiments, the amount of gravitational waves that has been detected is much more than many people expected, thus ruling out the vast majority of models of inflation based on a microscopic theory of the very high energy (see String Theory).
The good news is: Unwinding Inflation still stands! The model I developed together with my collaborators is one of the very few that might be able to explain inflation using String Theory. Lots of work still needs to be done on Unwinding to show that it can be embedded naturally into String Theory, but the road seem promising. This is very exciting for us and we are very much looking forward to future developements.
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