Astrophysics

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a next-generation radio telescope scheduled to commence construction in 2018. The SKA will be one of a small set of billion-dollar facilities that collectively span the electromagnetic spectrum, and will be an order of magnitude more sensitive than any other radio facility. The SKA's extraordinary survey capacity will allow it to map the distribution of galaxies and large-scale structure over an unprecedented cosmic volume, providing superb probes of dark matter, dark energy, neutrino physics, magnetogenesis, non-gaussianity and inflation. In addition, pulsar timing with the SKA will provide precision tests of general relativity in the strong field regime, and should allow us to detect gravitational radiation produced by merging supermassive black holes. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the capabilities and science goals for the SKA, highlighting its unique potential for advancing our understanding of cosmology and fundamental physics.

Cosmic background neutrinos are nearly as abundant as cosmic microwave background photons, but their mass, which determines the strength of their gravitational clustering, is unknown. Neutrino oscillation data gives a strict lower limit on neutrino mass, while cosmological datasets provide the most stringent upper limit. Even if the neutrino masses are the minimum required by oscillation data, their gravitational effects on structure formation will nevertheless be detectable in — and in fact required to explain — data within the next decade. I will discuss the physical effects of the cosmic neutrino background on structure formation and present a new signature that may be used to measure neutrino mass with large galaxy surveys.

In a broad class of theories, the relic abundance of dark matter is determined by interactions internal to a thermalized dark sector, with no direct involvement of the Standard Model. These theories raise an immediate cosmological question: how was the dark sector initially populated in the early universe? I will discuss one possibility, asymmetric reheating, which can populate a thermal dark sector that never reaches thermal equilibrium with the SM.

Using lensing of the CMB we can make maps of the dark matter distribution on the largest cosmological scales, perhaps allowing new insights into gravity, particle physics, and cosmology. With high-resolution maps of distant star-forming galaxies we can map dark matter on small scales within individual galaxies, measuring the small-scale clumping properties of dark matter.

The Planck collaboration is working towards a "legacy release" by the end of 2016 which will mark the end of the formal collaboration we set up back in the previous century. To this end, we keep improving further our control on the potential level of residual systematics in the data and in accounting for these uncertainties in the final cosmological results to further enhance the robustness and precision of the constraints posed by Planck. For instance, we announced in May an improved likelihood analysis using detailed end-to-end simulation as well as an improved constraint on the reionisation optical depth by using for the first time the E-mode polarisation data from the HFI instrument. This determination fully reconciles the CMB results with other astrophysical measurements of reionization from sources at high redshift. It also gives constraints on the level of reionization at redshifts beyond that of the most distant sources (z > 10). I will further give some perspectives on what is coming next.

A remarkable feature of the Standard Model is that it predicts that, in the absence of new physics, the Higgs field should become unstable at large energies. Though the electroweak vacuum should currently be metastable on timescales that are long compared to the age of the Universe, during an inflationary period, quantum fluctuations could have driven the development of regions of true vacuum at negative energy densities. I will discuss the evolution and spacetime dynamics of unstable Higgs fluctuations, illustrating how they can halt inflation in the regions they develop, and give rise to crunching regions and black holes with unusual properties. By combining this picture from general relativity with a detailed treatment of the stochastic development of such unstable Higgs fluctuations, bounds can be placed on the inflationary energy scale based on the existence of our current Universe.