Séminaire

Seminar of Philosophy of Science: Method-driven experiments and the search for dark matter


We are organising a cycle of seminars of philosophy of science at APC.
During 30 min, philosophers will present their research on a topic related to the themes of research of the laboratory. The presentation will be folllowed by a 30-min discussion between the audience and the speaker.
The event is open to all APC members, external members can attend on request.
A zoom link is communicated by email for the ones who wish to attend remotely.

A numerical approach to stochastic inflation and primordial black holes

Primordial black holes are a dark matter candidate, which may originate from strong perturbations created during inflation. These perturbations can be studied using the formalism of stochastic inflation. I present a numerical approach to this problem, where the stochastic dynamics is solved by generating a large number of random realizations. This makes it possible to go beyond analytical approximations and take into account additional effects such as backreaction between the perturbations and the background.

From pulsars to supermassive black holes and gravitational waves in between

Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) aim to detect nHz gravitational waves (GWs) from supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs). This is done by looking for correlated variations of the Time of Arrivals (TOA) across an array of ultra-stable millisecond pulsars. Comparing the predicted TOAs from our timing model against the measured TOAs gives us the residuals. These contain the imprint of GWs, but also other effects and sources of noise processes.

Detecting quantum entanglement in the sky

Although inflation is broadly accepted to be the standard paradigm for early universe cosmology, many of its quantum properties remain unknown. For instance, the crowning glory of inflation lies in explaining late-time macroscopic inhomogeneities as arising from tiny quantum fluctuations; however, most of the established literature ignores the crucial role that entanglement between the modes of the fluctuating field plays in its observable predictions.

Stochastic Gravitational Wave Backgrounds (SGWB) characterization with LISA

In this seminar I will discuss Stochastic Gravitational Wave Backgrounds (SGWB) characterization with LISA. After a general introduction on SGWB detection, I will explain the peculiar features of LISA with a focus on the response function and on the noise spectrum. The core of my talk will be the presentation of two different methods for model independent SGWB frequency reconstruction:
- The so-called ``binning method'' (1906.09244, 2009.11845) based on the idea of approximating the signal with a piecewise-defined function where each sub-function is a power law.

Primordial black holes from metric preheating: mass fraction in the excursion-set approach

We calculate the mass distribution of Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) produced during metric preheating. After inflation, the oscillations of the inflaton at the bottom of its potential source a parametric resonant instability for small-scale scalar perturbations, that may collapse into black holes. After reviewing in a pedagogical way different techniques that have been developed in the literature to compute mass distributions of PBHs, we focus on the excursion-set approach.

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