Astrophysics

I will introduce our recent proposal that the state of the universe does *not* spontaneously violate CPT. Instead, the universe before the Big Bang is the CPT reflection of the universe after the bang. Phrased another way, the universe before the bang and the universe after the bang may be re-interpreted as a universe/anti-universe pair, created from nothing. CPT selects a unique vacuum state for the QFT on such a spacetime, which leads to a new perspective on the cosmological baryon asymmetry, and a new explanation for the observed dark matter abundance. In particular, if we assume that the matter fields in the universe are described by the standard model of particle physics (including right-handed neutrinos), we predict that one of the heavy neutrinos is stable, and that its density automatically matches the observed dark matter density if its mass is 4.8 x 10^8 GeV. Among other predictions, we have: (i) that the three light neutrinos are majorana; (ii) that the lightest of these is exactly massless; and (iii) that there are no primordial long-wavelength gravitational waves. I will mention connections to the strong CP problem and the arrow of time. (Based on arXiv:1803.08928 and arXiv:1803.08930, with Kieran Finn and Neil Turok.)

Cosmic variance puts hard limits on what we can learn about fundamental physical processes on the largest cosmological scales. A neat trick allows this limit to be circumvented in some cases though, by cross-correlating multiple tracers of the cosmic matter distribution. After giving a few examples of where the multi-tracer technique can be useful, I will outline a new analytic statistical model to describe how the galaxies seen in different surveys (and at different wavelengths) jointly populate the dark matter halo distribution. While the model is necessarily simplified, its flexibility and analytic nature allow rapid exploration of the parameter space relevant to forthcoming surveys in the optical, IR, microwave, and radio. I will show the results of an MCMC fit to low-redshift multi-frequency (radio and optical) luminosity function data, and then discuss several successful (and not-so-successful) consistency tests of the model.

In 2020 the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the Euclid satellite mission. Euclid is an ESA medium class astronomy and astrophysics space mission, and will undertake a galaxy redshift survey over the redshift range 0.9 < z < 1.8, while simultaneously performing an imaging survey in both visible and near infrared bands. The complete survey will provide hundreds of thousands images and several tens of Petabytes of data. About 10 billion sources will be observed by Euclid out of which several tens of million galaxy redshifts will be measured and used to make galaxy clustering measurements. These observations will be used to help to understand Dark Energy, the physical mechanism causing the current acceleration in the expansion of the Universe.

In classical General Relativity (GR), an observer falling into an astrophysical black hole (BH) is not expected to experience anything dramatic as she crosses the event horizon. However, tentative resolutions to problems in quantum gravity, such as the cosmological constant problem or the black hole information paradox, invoke significant departures from classicality in the vicinity of the horizon. I outline theoretical and phenomenological arguments for these departures. I will then discuss the tentative observational evidence for Planck-scale structure near BH horizons, seen as "echoes" in LIGO gravitational wave observations,  which has now been found by three independent groups. Finally, I present preliminary analysis which strongly suggest formation of a highly spinning black hole within 0.5 second of GW170817 binary neutron star merger, based on prominent echoes in the LIGO strain data. 

Large scale structure surveys are one of our primary tools for answering open questions in cosmology like: What is the physics behind dark energy? Is gravity well described by general relativity on cosmological scales, or does that description need to be extended? In order to take full advantage of the information contained in survey data, however, we must ensure that we understand our data’s sensitivity to new physics and that our analyses are not biased by systematics. In my talk I’ll describe work I have been doing in this aim for the Dark Energy Survey (DES). I’ll begin with an introduction to how we can use data from surveys like the DES to test LCDM, including approaches to constraining extensions to general relativity with cosmological data. I’ll use that discussion to motivate a so-called growth-geometry split analysis, a consistency test of LCDM that works by comparing constraints from probes of structure growth and expansion history, and will discuss the status of such an analysis applied to DES data. I’ll also give an overview of the blinding strategy planned for future multi-probe DES cosmology analyses.