Speaker
Description
The dynamics of the early universe has the possibility to imprint interesting features on the spectrum of primordial perturbations which serve as initial conditions for the standard hot big bang evolution and formation of structure at later times. In the inflationary paradigm, sharp features in the trajectory of the inflaton could lead to interesting deviations away from the standard nearly-scale-invariant primordial spectrum, in turn imprinting on cosmological observations. In this talk, I will focus on the impact that features in the primordial spectrum have on the formation of structure in the late universe. I will outline the classes of models that may cause these phenomena and describe the expected effects on the distribution of dark matter haloes at late times by computing the halo mass function. I will also briefly compare these scenarios to other phenomena which may have similar impacts on structure formation, such as first order phase transitions in the early universe.