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March 17, 2023 past

Gravity, Astroparticle and Particle Physics (GAPP) Seminar

320 Whitmore Lab

Gravity, Astroparticle and Particle Physics (GAPP) Seminar

I will explore the possibility that the couplings describing the strengths of the Standard Model gauge forces take different values at very early times. As I will show, such a scenario is typically consistent with current observations if the variation happens early enough, and can cause us to radically rethink processes such as dark matter production or the generation of the matter-anti-matter asymmetry.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2023-03-17 11:00 Tim Tait Dynamical Couplings in the Early Universe
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.