Théorie

Cosmic strings (CS) are topological defects formed after spontaneous breaking of a U(1) symmetry. Remarkably, thanks to the scaling regime, CS loops constitute a long-standing source of Gravitational Waves (GW) and produce a flat GW spectrum during radiation domination, spanning many orders of magnitude in frequency.

Dear all,

We are very happy to welcome Andrzej M. Szelc (Royal Society University Research Fellow, the University of Manchester) at APC this week.

Andrzej will talk about the "Long- and Short-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiments” (abstract and poster below) in Amphi PGG on Friday, February 7th at 11am.

Vincent and Josquin

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Title: Long- and Short-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiments  

Over the last decades, the emergence of conformal symmetry in gravitational systems has provided a powerful tool to investigate new aspects in classical, semi-classical and quantum general relativity.
The standard cosmological model determined from the accurate cosmic microwave background measurements made by the Planck satellite implies a value of the Hubble constant H0 that is 4.4 standard deviations lower than the one determined from Type Ia supernovae. The Planck best fit model also predicts lower values of the matter density fraction Om and clustering amplitude S8 compared to those obtained from the Dark Energy Survey Year 1 data.
The idea that low energy fields such as Gravitons or Axions can be 
thought of as composite particles has been entertained since a long 
time. We revisit this idea motivated by the AdS/CFT correspondence. We 
focus in the case of axions and show that hidden sectors coupled to SM 
fields may provide an emergent axionic field that is a composite of the 
hidden fields (instanton density). This is a more general phenomenon 
beyond holographic theories. We study the general properties of such an 
"emergent axion", without a PQ symmetry.
Inflation, an era of accelerated expansion of the universe prior to the radiation phase, constitutes the paradigm of primordial cosmology. Within this paradigm, the simplest single-field slow-roll models economically explain all curent data. However, the sensitivity of inflation to Planck scale physics, and the fact that ultraviolet completions of inflation invariably involve extra fields coupled to the inflaton, indicate that these models constitute at best a phenomenological description that emerges from a more realistic physical framework.

The observed accelerated expansion of the Universe opens up
the possibility that general relativity is modified on cosmological
scales. While this has motivated the theoretical study of many
alternative theories that will be tested by the next generation of
cosmic large-scale structure surveys, I will show that the recent
observations of gravitational waves by LIGO/Virgo has dramatic
consequences on these theories.