New physics from the CMB: the next decade

ABSTRACT
Observations of the cosmic microwave background have been key to our understanding of the early universe. The cosmic microwave background also contains invaluable information about particle physics that can be revealed through precision observations of the polarization anisotropies. In this talk I will review the key areas where precision CMB experiments can provide new information and give an overview of the current and next generation CMB experiments.
BIO
Raphael Flauger is an associate professor at UC San Diego. He received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas in 2009. He held postdoctoral positions at Yale and at the Institute for Advanced Study and New York University before becoming an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University in 2014, moving to UT Austin in 2015 and to UC San Diego in 2016. He received the New Horizons in Physics prize in 2016. He works on models of the early universe and looks for their predictions mostly from cosmic microwave background data. He is also interested in astrophysical processes that must be understood to extract clue about the very early universe. He has been heralded for leading the criticism of the claim by the BICEP2 collaboration to have observed the signature of gravitational waves during a period of cosmic inflation in the early universe. In addition to cosmology, Flauger is interested in both formal aspects and applications of quantum field theories.

Q&A