ARC Seminar 11 September 2020: Eiichiro Komatsu from Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics.

Abstract: The cosmic microwave background (CMB) research told us a remarkable story: the structure we see in our Universe such as galaxies, stars, planets, and eventually ourselves originated from tiny quantum fluctuations generated in the early Universe. With the WMAP we have confirmed many of the key predictions of inflation including flatness and statistical homogeneity of our Universe, Gaussianity and adiabaticity of primordial density fluctuations, and a small but non-zero deviation from the scale-invariant spectrum of density fluctuations. Yet, the extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. The last prediction of inflation that is yet to be confirmed is the existence of primordial gravitational waves whose wavelength can be as big as billions of light-years. To this end, we have proposed to JAXA a new satellite mission called LiteBIRD, whose primary scientific goal is to find signatures of gravitational waves in the polarisation of the CMB. In this presentation, we describe physics of gravitational waves from inflation including both the vacuum and sourced contributions (i.e., left and right hands of Einstein's equation), the LiteBIRD proposal, as well as a sub-mm telescope in Chile called CCAT-prime that we are currently building.

The Astrophysics Research Centre (ARC) is part of the College of Agriculture, Engineering and Science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). We strive to be a world-class centre of excellence for research and postgraduate training in astrophysics and related data-intensive science.

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