Simon Fraser University
SFU Cosmology Seminars

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Friday, 21 October 2011, 15:30 in AQ3149

Prof. Andrei Frolov (SFU)

Staring at the sky (physics colloquium)

Cosmic microwave background (CMB) carries to us a snapshot of the Universe from the times when it was much younger than it is today. Small anisotropies in CMB temperature are caused by fluctuations of gravitational potential at recombination, which photons have to climb out of. In inflationary cosmology, these are created by primordial quantum fluctuations of the field driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe, and are essentially Gaussian random noise of nearly scale-invariant spectrum. CMB anisotropy spectrum has been mapped out to exquisite precision over the last decade. Is there anything new we could see? In this talk, I will discuss searching for non-Gaussianity in the CMB - the distortions and patterns hidden in the noise, and what they could tell us about the early Univese physics.

Seminars in 2011:

2011-09-15 14:00 in P8445B - Tanmay Vachaspati (Arizona State University): Primordial magnetic fields from the electroweak epoch
2011-10-18 14:00 in P8445B - Yin-Zhe Ma (UBC): Cosmology on large and small cosmic scales
2011-10-21 15:30 in AQ3149 - Andrei Frolov (SFU): Staring at the sky (physics colloquium)
2011-10-25 14:00 in P8445B - Ali Narimani (UBC): Dimensionless cosmology
2011-11-01 14:00 in P8445B - Andrei Frolov (SFU): Critical collapse and solitons in classical conformal field theory
2011-11-15 14:00 in P8445B - Archisman Ghosh (University of Kentucky): Cosmological singularities and AdS/CFT
2011-11-22 14:00 in P8445B - Jun-Qi Guo (SFU): Scalar wave propagation in Schwarzschild metric in some usual coordinates
2011-11-25 14:30 in AQ3149 - Levon Pogosian (SFU): Lambda, w and beyond (physics colloquium)
2011-11-29 14:00 in P8445B - Daniel Thomas (Imperial College): Making gravity count: Cluster numbers and other cosmological observables in model independent modified gravity
2012-01-17 14:00 in P8445B - Levon Pogosian (SFU): Fables of reconstruction: controlling bias in the dark energy equation of state
2012-02-07 14:00 in P8445B - Scott Dodelson (Fermilab): Gravitational lensing
2012-02-23 14:00 in P8445B - Jonathan Thornburg (Indiana University): Modelling extreme mass ratio binary black hole inspirals for eLISA
2012-03-08 14:00 in P8445B - Jarah Evslin (IHEP, Beijing): Galaxy-sized monopoles as dark matter?

[ See complete seminar archives | iCal feed ]

Modified by Andrei Frolov <frolov@sfu.ca> on 2023-11-01