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.
Amsterdam Fall 2019
06/12/2019 @ 14:00 - 17:30
Amsterdam, December 6th.
The meeting will take place in Amsterdam, at Nikhef, Science Park 105, in room H331.
14:00 – 15:00: Talk by Toshifumi Noumi (Kobe University)
Title:Enlarging the scope of the cosmological collider: Beyond the positivity bounds
Abstract:
The energy scale of inflation could be as high as 10^14 GeV, hence it is a phenomenon at the highest energy scale we may explore. Primordial non-Gaussianities can then be thought of as a 10^14 GeV collider (dubbed the cosmological collider), which may be used to probe new particles at the inflationary scale. In this talk I will discuss how to read of the mass and spin of new particles at various scales from non-Gaussianities. In particular I will demonstrate that signs of inflaton effective interactions (which are not constrained by the positivity bounds) are useful to probe spins of particles heavier than the Hubble scale.
15:00 – 15:30: Coffee Break
15:30 – 16:30: Talk by Alex Cole(University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Title: Simplices in the Sky — Constraining Cosmology with Computational Topology
Abstract:
In this talk, I will describe how persistent homology, a somewhat recent development in computational topology and the main pillar of Topological Data Analysis (TDA), is a useful tool for characterizing cosmological observables in the search for new physics. After motivating the utility of developing new perspectives for analyzing cosmological data, I will review the basics of persistent homology. I will then describe how persistent homology connects to several topological statistics that have appeared previously in the cosmology literature, and how it is strictly more powerful than these statistics. To see how much mileage our improved method gives us, I will outline two applications of persistent homology to cosmology: one project with G. Shiu on primordial non-Gaussianity and the CMB (1712.08159), and work in progress with G. Shiu and M. Biagetti regarding LSS.
16:30 – 17:30: Borrel