(Pedestrian Seminar) Evidence for quantum effects in gravity: from spontaneous particle production to BICEP2 discovery

por Adrián Del Río Vega

martes 29 abr. 2014 16:30 → 18:00 Europe/Madrid

Seminar 1.1.1 (IFIC)

BICEP 2 experiment managed to detect an excess of B mode polarization power in CMB spectrum over the base lensed-ΛCDM expectation, confirming this way the production of primordial gravitational waves during the early stages of the Universe. This discovery implies a unique confirmation of inflation. In this lecture we will talk about the fundamental physics underlying this phenomenon covering basic topics of quantum field theory in curved spacetime, such as the uncertainty of the vacuum state, and the quantum effect of spontaneous particle production found by L. Parker in the mid-sixties. We will then connect this idea to the inflationary paradigm and compute the standard observables that support this cosmological scenario.