Theoretical Cosmology meetings
To actively encourage the field of theoretical cosmology and to set an informal stage for the exchange of ideas, the Dutch theoretical cosmology community organizes Friday afternoon meetings approximately 6 times a year — usually on the first Friday of the month. The meetings typically start in the afternoon with a main speaker, followed by a short break to continue with another seminar or journal club discussion on some topic of current interest. We end the afternoon with drinks. The supporting institutes in Leiden, Amsterdam, Groningen, Utrecht where recently joined by the strings and cosmology group in Leuven and take turns in hosting the event.
- This event has passed.
Utrecht Fall 2016
04/11/2016 @ 12:00 - 18:00
Utrecht, November 4, 2016
Place: Universiteit Utrecht, Buys Ballot Gebouw, room 712
For this meeting we will have two external speakers
14:00-15:00 Talk by Jose Espinosa (IFAE & ICREA Barcelona, Spain)
Title: Higgs inflation as a mirage
Abstract: After reviewing the nice properties of Higgs inflation and some of its problems, I will discuss a simple unitarization of the scenario that is genuinely weakly coupled up to Planckian energies. A large non-minimal coupling between the Higgs and the Ricci curvature is induced dynamically at intermediate energies, as a simple ratio of mass scales. Inflationary dynamics is not dominated by the Higgs field, but ‘Higgs inflation’ arises as an approximate ‘mirage’ picture of the true dynamics. I will speculate on the generality of this phenomenon and show that, if Higgs-inflation arises as an effective description, the details of the UV completion are necessary to extract robust quantitative predictions.
15:00-15:30 Coffee Break
15:30-16:30 Talk by Kimmo Kainulainen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)
Title: Baryogenesis, dark matter and UV-complete extensions of the Standard Model
Abstract: The measured Higgs mass value 125 GeV suggests that the standard model may be a UV-complete theory up to Planck scale. However, the questions of the nature of the dark matter and of the origin of the baryon asymmetry remain unsolved in the SM. Can we solve these problems and still maintain UV-completeness in simple extensios of the SM without supersymmetry or technicolor? I will discuss these problems in the context of scalar extensions of the SM, scalar dark matter and electroweak baryognesis.
16:30 Drinks