Decoding Primordial Fluctuations
I will review our current understanding of the initial conditions of the universe, and describe what information is available from current and future measurements of cosmological correlation functions. Then I will describe a new method developed to compute and constrain the possible shapes of those correlation functions. This ``cosmological bootstrap” draws much inspiration from the modern scattering amplitudes program in flat space, and also from the conformal bootstrap of phase transitions. A thorough understanding of the fluctuations will give us insight into particle physics at very high energy scales and may provide a window into the nature of spacetime itself. Time permitting, I will describe a toy example of emergent time in cosmological correlations.
Friday, 15th December 2023, 14:30, Aula Magna