31 August 2026 to 4 September 2026
Australia/Sydney timezone

Session

Cosmic Microwave Background and the Early Universe

31 Aug 2026, 14:00

Presentation materials

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  1. Dr JAVIER RUBIO (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
    31/08/2026, 14:00
    Inflation and early universe physics

    When coupled to gravity, the Standard Model Higgs field can undergo non-trivial post-inflationary dynamics. In scenarios involving a short kination phase, the rapid change in spacetime curvature may destabilize the electroweak vacuum via curvature-induced tachyonic instabilities, effectively triggering a gravitationally driven phase transition. This mechanism can generate a rapid growth of...

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  2. Prof. Anirban Das (Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics)
    31/08/2026, 14:25
    Cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure

    Neutrinos are the known portal to the beyond-Standard Model physics. Any new self-interaction among the active neutrinos other than the electroweak interaction gives rise to rich phenomenology in the cosmological observables. In this talk, I'll present a novel scenario where the active neutrinos are partially converted into a hidden sector radiation in the early Universe. This hidden sector...

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  3. Jahanvi Maheshwari (UNSW Sydney)
    31/08/2026, 14:50
    Cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure

    In a multiverse born from eternal inflation, collisions between bubble universes can leave potentially observable imprints in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. Specifically, these take the form of sharply defined circular hot or cold spots in CMB temperature map. In this paper, we employ an algorithm based on optimal filtering techniques to identify candidates for bubble...

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  4. Nazeef Nazeeef (UNSW)
    31/08/2026, 15:15
    Cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure

    Grand unified theories and other extensions of the Standard Model predict topological defects such as Cosmic strings. These are 1-dimensional strings, formed during the symmetry-breaking phase transitions of the early universe. Propagating strings created overdense envelopes of primordial gas (called wakes), resulting in overdensities of neutral hydrogen. The electrons in ground-state neutral...

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  5. Amelie Read (University of Sydney)
    31/08/2026, 16:10
    Cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure

    Caustic skeleton theory is an analytical phase-space based formalism that predicts that the cosmic web is composed of a hierarchy of singularities that manifest as walls, filaments and cluster nodes, arising from the evolution of the dark matter cosmological fluid. We pull caustic skeleton theory into the observational reality of the cosmic web in the Local Universe by applying it to the...

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  6. Yanhui Yang (University of California, Riverside)
    31/08/2026, 16:35
    Cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure

    Upcoming cosmological surveys, such as the Roman Space Telescope, will deliver unprecedented data for studies of the large-scale structure of the Universe. These observations will shed new light on cosmic evolution and the nature of its fundamental components, including dark matter and dark energy. Fully exploiting these datasets requires theoretical predictions that are both accurate and...

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  7. Mr Alan Chan (The Australian National University)
    31/08/2026, 17:00
    Dark energy

    Type Ia supernovae remain one of the key observational probes of dark energy, but their cosmological constraining power depends on constructing Hubble diagrams with well-understood biases. In future high-statistics time-domain surveys, such as TiDES and LSST-era spectroscopic follow-up programmes, host-galaxy redshifts will often need to be obtained under finite spectroscopic resources. It is...

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  8. Nathan Cohen
    01/09/2026, 16:10
    Cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure

    The formalism of Bayesian model selection provides a very elegant way of ranking different physical models in terms of how compatible they are with a given set of observed data. However, its practical application is often hampered by the challenge of having to compute the Bayesian evidence – a multi-dimensional integral over the product of likelihood and prior probability. This usually...

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  9. Alexandra Nemtinova
    01/09/2026, 16:35
    Inflation and early universe physics

    Inflation is the leading model of the early Universe, predicting primordial gravitational waves characterized by the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ and the tensor spectral tilt $n_t$. We present updated constraints on these parameters using the latest cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization data from Planck, the South Pole Telescope, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, and the...

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  10. Harsh Mehta (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai)
    01/09/2026, 17:00
    Cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure

    Axions or axion-like particles are hypothetical particles predicted by various BSM theories, which also make one of the dark matter candidates. The CMB is the primordial radiation that surrounds us and it follows an ideal blackbody spectrum, hence deviation in its behaviour can be used to probe new physics. If ALPs exist in nature, the CMB photons as they pass through galaxy clusters will...

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