CP3 Lunch - Results from the Poor Man's Accelerator Experiment - Larissa Lorenz

by Dr Larissa Lorenz (UCL - CP3)

Wednesday 24 Mar 2010, 13:00 → 13:50 Europe/Brussels

Seminar room (E.349)

In cosmology, we try to determine the constituents and the history of our Universe from today's leftovers of the Big Bang. The most important tool for this is the cosmic microwave background radiation, whose spectrum has now been measured to very high precision. I will discuss how these measurements lead us to infer a phase of inflationary expansion in the very early Universe and why inflation might allow us to explore (and possibly constrain) high energy theories such as string theory. Standard inflationary calculations have to be adapted to a string theoretic setting, both for the calculation of the perturbation spectra and conceptional issues such as stochastic inflation.