Search Talks

In this talk, I am going to test the concordance cosmology in three different cosmic scales. (1) On the super-horizon scale, “Copi etal. (2009)” have been arguing that the lack of large angular correlations of the CMB temperature field provides strong evidence against the standard, statistically isotropic, LCDM cosmology. I am going to argue that the “ad-hoc” discrepancy is due to the sub-optimal estimator of the low-l multipoles, and a posteriori statistics, which exaggerates the statistical significance. (2) LCDM model also predict the existence of primordial gravitational wave, for which B-mode polarization will be a powerful tool to distinguish different models of the early Universe; (3) On Galactic scales, “Watkins et al. (2008)” shows that the very large bulk flow prefers a very large density fluctuation, which seems to contradict to the LCDM model. We provide a physical explanation for this big bulk flow, based on the assumption that CMB frame does not coincide with matter rest frame, resulting in the tilted Universe. We show that the ‘tilted Universe’ could well explain the bulk flow phenomena and more importantly, the constraints for this tilted Universe can lead to the constraint on the number of e-folds of inflation; (4) In addition, cosmic Mach Number from peculiar velocity catalog may provide a powerful test of the growth of the structure.

I will discuss some work on the collider phenomenology and cosmology of light gravitino dark matter, and will touch on some related issues concerning infrared divergences in charged-particle decay at finite temperature.
Light gravitinos, with mass in the eV to MeV range, are well-motivated in particle physics, but their status as dark-matter candidates is muddled by early-Universe uncertainties.

I present a simple exactly solveable model of eternal inflation.  The correlation functions have a discrete analogue of conformal symmetry, which can be compactly expressed using the machinery of p-adic numbers.  I comment on the implications for actual cosmology, and in particular for holographic descriptions of eternal inflation.

Supersymmetry plays a fundamental role in the radiative stability of many inflationary models.  I will explain how supersymmetry and naturalness require additional scalar degrees of freedom with masses on the order of the inflationary Hubble scale.  These fields lead to distinctive non-gaussian signatures that may be observable in both the CMB and large scale structure.