Marius Millea, Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics
When
Where
Abstract: Abstract: Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background made over the last decade underpin our "standard model of cosmology." They have established the abundance of dark matter and baryons in the universe to percent precision, determined the universe is nearly flat, and heavily constrained any extra relativistic degrees of freedom in the standard model beyond the 3 active neutrino species. They have also unearthed some interesting mysteries, such as the apparent discrepancy in the Hubble expansion rate of the universe when inferred from early times as compared to local more direct measurements. I will give an overview of these tensions and types of theoretical resolutions they might suggest. Looking forward to the next decade, a slew of lower-noise high-resolution CMB measurements will shed new light on this tension and harbor in a new era for CMB, where the majority of new information is sourced from the gravitational lensing of the CMB. I will discuss theoretical promises from these new measurements, as well as exciting Bayesian and machine learning methodological developments that allow fully extracting information from the lensing effect, and which can be applied to a wide range of problems in physics.
Refreshments in PAS 218 2:45PM
In-person only