Mr
David Rodriguez
(King's College London)
12/01/2018, 09:00
We consider the effect of the Gibbons-Hawking radiation on the inflaton in the situation where it is coupled to a large number of spectator fields. We argue that this will lead to two important effects - a thermal contribution to the potential and a gradual change in parameters in the Lagrangian which results from thermodynamic and energy conservation arguments. We present a scenario of...
Mr
Alex Jenkins
(King's College London)
12/01/2018, 09:10
With gravitational-wave interferometry firmly established as a new field of astronomy, one of the most exciting targets for future observations is the *stochastic gravitational-wave background* (SGWB). Comprised of a large number of distant, unresolved sources, this background carries much information about the early universe, and will soon become a powerful cosmological probe.
While the...
Ms
Arianna Renzini
(Imperial College London)
12/01/2018, 09:20
The Gravitational Wave Background (GWB) is a cornucopia of information, waiting to be unraveled and explored; to this end, we've constructed a mapper which reconstructs the GWB anisotropies on the sky. In this talk, I will first introduce the GWB and its unique features. I will then present what type of data we expect to work with, and explain the mapping algorithm. Finally, I will motivate...
Ms
Stav Zalel
(Imperial College London)
12/01/2018, 09:40
The causal set approach to quantum gravity postulates that spacetime is fundamentally discrete. In this formalism spacetime is a causal set and each element in the set is a "spacetime atom" — a “here and now”, like a click of the fingers. The causal set spacetime grows through a stochastic process in which new elements are born into the set. We experience this birth process as the passage of...
Mr
Matthew Mostert
(University of Southampton)
12/01/2018, 10:00
A cornerstone of modern cosmology is that the Big Bang was followed by a period of rapid expansion, a time we have come to call: inflation. This mechanism has been very successful in explaining a number of cosmological observations; flatness, isotropy, and structure formation in the universe we observe today, as well as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Inflation, whilst being widely...
