Severo Ochoa Seminar: Present and future of fundamental physics with the cosmic microwave background

por Martina Gerbino (Stockholm University - Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmo Particle Physics)

viernes 11 may. 2018 12:30 → 13:30 Europe/Madrid

Seminar Room, 1.1.1 (IFIC)

Cosmology has proved to be a preferred arena to test fundamental physics. In fact, maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies carry the imprint of early Universe physics and, at the same time, are enriched by the fact that CMB photons have made their way to us travelling through evolving structures. Measurements of CMB anisotropies have reached a very good level of maturity over the last decades. The Planck satellite have put the tightest constraints ever on cosmological parameters from a single experiment, dramatically improving the constraints from the predecessors. From the ground, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the South Pole Telescope have been measuring with incredible accuracy CMB anisotropies at the smallest scales in temperature and polarisation. At degree and sub-degree scales, the BICEP/Keck collaboration and the POLARBEAR telescope are looking at the faint CMB B-mode signal, containing information about both the early stages of the Universe (primordial B-modes) and the late time evolution (lensing B-modes). However, this is not the end of the story. A huge technological effort is paving the way to a new generation of CMB experiments, which will measure the CMB sky in temperature and polarisation with unprecedented accuracy.
In this talk, I will present the state-of-the-art of the constraints from CMB and additional cosmological data on fundamental physics, mostly focusing on early universe and neutrino physics. I will finally discuss the improvements that we expect in the next decades on the same sectors.