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In what has become a yearly tradition of inviting leading, expert researchers to discuss at length a topic at the forefront of modern physics research, the high-energy group at Florida State University will host a workshop on 'Cosmology: From Inflation to the Cosmic Microwave Background'.
For many years the study of cosmology was relegated as a subject only of interest to an obscure subset of astronomers and had great difficulty gaining mainstream attention because it was widely considered a very imprecise subject. It is sobering to realize that this has changed in our lifetimes and it is certain that cosmology will play a larger and larger role in our understanding in all the areas of physics in the coming years.
Cosmic inflation strives to answer many residual problems in the standard cosmology in an economic way. Proposed, refined, and extended by Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, Andreas Albrecht, and Paul Steinhardt -- inflation has become an essential part of the modern paradigm of the early universe. In many ways, our understanding of today's Universe is directly linked to our understanding of the inflationary period. Inflation can be thought of as the foundation of the house of cosmology.
The Cosmic Microwave Background (or CMB) is a thermal bath of blackbody photons that come to us from the Universe in its infancy. Its existence was predicted in 1948 by Gamow and Alpher (and extended by Alpher and Herman). These results were not widely known and were rediscovered by Dicke and Zel-dovich in the early sixties. In an interesting turn of events that should be taken to heart by any physicist in training, Penzias and Wilson experimentally confirmed the existence of the CMB in 1964-5 that eventually earned a trip to Stockholm.
Since then, it has been both a marathon and a sprint to measure, probe, derive, and cajole everything that we can from the CMB. It would not be an overstatement to say that the CMB gives us a window into the physics of our dreams.
The lectures will be approximately one hour with time for questions. For more information please contact Bryan Field (email).
| March 26: 2:45 PM | Welcoming Remarks, Keen Room 707 | |
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| March 26: 3:00 PM | Will Kinney, Buffalo | Lecture 1 |
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Cosmological Expansion and the Horizon and Flatness Problems
I will discuss the basics of Robertson-Walker spaces and cosmological
expansion, and discuss two puzzles of the standard Big Bang cosmology,
known as the horizon and flatness problems: i.e., why is the universe so
big, and why is it so geometrically flat?
| March 26: 4:00 PM | Arthur Kosowsky, Pittsburgh | Lecture 1 |
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Basics of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), particularly the acoustic oscillations at the time of recombination, how those appear as peaks in the power spectrum, the cosmological information contained in those peaks, and current measurements and what they tell us.
| March 27: 10:00 AM | Will Kinney, Buffalo | Lecture 2 |
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Inflation
I will discuss the idea of accelerated expansion as a solution to the
horizon and flatness problems, and discuss inflationary model building
in scalar field theories.
| March 27: 11:00 AM | Arthur Kosowsky, Pittsburgh | Lecture 2 |
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Secondary fluctuations in the microwave background, arising from the interaction of the microwaves with the structure that forms at later times, particularly the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. I'll cover the basics of this effect, talk about some of the cosmological constraints it can provide, and talk about the ACT experiment which is currently working to measure these signals.
| March 28: 10:00 AM | Will Kinney, Buffalo | Lecture 3 |
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Quantum fluctuations and the generation of structure in the universe.
Once we introduce inflation as a solution to global problems in
cosmology, we get something else for free: quantum fluctuations in
inflation are stretched by the rapid expansion to scales much larger
than the cosmological horizon. This provides a mechanism for generating
the "seed" perturbations for structure in the universe, and opens
inflation to observational test, most importantly from precise
measurement of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy. I will discuss
the generation of structure in inflationary cosmology, and the current
state of observational constraints.
| March 28: 11:00 AM | Arthur Kosowsky, Pittsburgh | Lecture 3 |
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Microwave polarization: how it is generated, why it couples to tensor or vector perturbations in the universe, how this can constrain inflation, and current measurements and future prospects.