I spent the day at Perimeter, where there was a full schedule of talks about cosmological observations. There were many highlights; indeed all the talks were great. In particular, Olivier Doré (CITA) showed that simple inflation-inspired non-gaussianity can lead to very strong scale-dependent bias, even at large scales where we think that locality ensures linear bias. This may provide new ways to demonstrate gaussianity in the near term with galaxy surveys.
Gil Holder (McGill) told us about the brave new world of CMB, now that the primary anisotropy is nailed. He even gave a conceivable methodology for working out the z=1100 initial conditions for a large volume of the Universe using cross-correlations of CMB polarization and 21cm emission.
Dan Holz (LANL) showed us how black hole mergers are unprecedented standard sirens
for cosmology.
Mike Kesden (CITA) used simple symmetries including parity and exchange symmetries to put constraints on the possible outcomes of (no-hair) black-hole—black-hole collisions; he has produced some wonderful results with symmetries alone. He can predict the outcomes of numerical simulations (which are ridiculously expensive). Bravo!
No comments:
Post a Comment