Listening for the Echoes of Inflation with BICEP2 and Beyond

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Speaker(s): Jeffrey Filippini

Our modern account of cosmic history begins with a period of extraordinarily rapid expansion known as inflation. This epoch established the large-scale geometry and uniformity of our universe, as well as sowing the seeds of later galaxy formation. Inflation should further have imprinted a spectrum of primordial gravitational waves onto the universe at cosmological scales. These gravitational waves should have left a unique twist” signature in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of the hot early universe. In March the BICEP2 collaboration shocked the world by announcing the detection of just this twist pattern, after three years of targeted observation from the South Pole. In this talk I will describe the BICEP2 instrument, its remarkable measurement, and our current understanding of what it may mean. I will also describe some of the upcoming instruments that are continuing the search for the echoes of inflation.

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Colloquium

Junior and senior physics majors attend our biweekly colloquium series, held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 p.m. in Shanahan B460. The talks are open to all students and to the public, and are frequently attended by scientists from the other Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, and others. The series features speakers from a broad range of institutions and fields of physics.