TITLE: "The emerging picture of the universe from precision cosmology"

SPEAKER: Professor Laura Mersini,

TIME: Thursday Apr. 21, 2005 at 4 PM

PLACE: George P. Williams, Jr. Lecture Hall, (Olin 101)

Findings of present data from 'precision cosmology' are often interpreted as indicating a need for the underlying fundamental theory in order to address some of the outstanding issues in cosmology. Data is scrutinized and interpreted in a model dependent way, and many findings can be accomodated by both standard cosmology or new physics. Thus before embarking on speculations about what the new physics might be, we need to address a very important questions : How can we distinguish from observations new physics signatures from imprints of conventional cosmology? I will discuss a new method for discriminating new physics imprints from features in the inflaton potential through cross-correlations of CMB spectra with the gravitational potential of the LSS. Comparing the primordial sources of perturbations and clustering properties in a model independent way, makes the case that the next wealth of information in cosmology may be expected from weak lensing experiments at very large scales.

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