Speaker
Description
Our universe has many puzzles. For example, we do not fully understand why we live in a four-dimensional universe out of the ten that string theory predicts. Additionally, many observed cosmological features, such as the scale-invariant spectrum of cosmological perturbations on large scales, cannot be explained by standard Big Bang physics alone. In this short presentation, I will discuss a new cosmological scenario, developed as part of my PhD thesis, that may be able to answer some of these questions. In this scenario, we describe our universe using a matrix model related to string theory, namely the BFSS matrix model. Building on numerical hints from a related model, we find evidence for a cosmological scenario in which three emergent spatial dimensions arise, together with a scale-invariant spectrum of cosmological perturbations on large scales. Our analysis leaves many open questions, including the mechanisms underlying emergent space and a more complete description of its properties, to be explored in future work.