Speaker: Scott Melville (Queen Mary University of London)
Title: Scattering Amplitudes for the Cosmological Collider
Abstract: The high-energy, high-curvature environment in the early inflationary universe is an ideal laboratory in which to search for new fundamental physics. However, theoretical developments are needed if we are to translate the signals that could be measured by upcoming sky surveys (e.g. of primordial non-Gaussianity) into concrete properties of the quantum fields which produced them during inflation. In this talk, I will describe recent progress in importing techniques from (Minkowski) scattering amplitudes to cosmological (quasi-de Sitter) spacetimes and in particular focus on how the S-matrix and the wavefunction for scalar fluctuations on de Sitter can be computed/constrained using fundamental principles such as unitarity and causality.
Place: CoPS room/A5:1041 and Zoom