Visible light exposure of galaxy cluster Abell 2744 from NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESO's Very Large Telescope, X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory & math reconstruction of dark matter location. D. Coe & J. Merten/ESO/NASA/ESA/CXC
Theory Seminar

Initial Conditions for Inflation

Katy Clough (Hosted by Mertens), Oxford University

Inflation solves a number of problems in early universe cosmology but potentially introduces some new ones regarding how it was able to get started in the first place. In this talk I will explain these issues in the context of single field slow roll inflationary models, and discuss how they might restrict the phase space of initial conditions and early universe models that we consider valid. I will describe work I have done using numerical relativity to investigate the problem in the non-linear regime.

Zoom link available upon request at physics@wustl.edu.
Post-docs and students' Q&A with the speaker starts at 2:15 pm.  Contact Garrett King for the Q&A Zoom link.