Cosmological Frontiers in Fundamental Physics - 2010

The network of tests shows the LCDM cosmology is a good approximation to what actually happened, but that need not mean it has all the physics relevant to cosmology back to light element formation. I will review properties of galaxies that seem to be particularly difficult to understand within LCDM and might be pointing to still better physics.

Constraining primordial non-Gaussianity can offer a window into the early universe, and into testing the inflationary paradigm, which is fully complementary to the approach offered by Cosmic Microwave Background polarization. Large-scale structure and galaxy surveys have recently received renewed attention as a way to constrain primordial non-Gaussianity. I will review the potential and the limitations of this approach and highlight its complementarity to Cosmic Microwave Background observations.

We describe recent progress on the quantum description of the Kerr black hole. Previous descriptions of black hole microstates have relied on the existence of near-horizon regions with conformal symmetry, and hence have only worked for extremal or supersymmetric black holes. We argue that the states of non-extremal black holes can also be understood in terms of a conformal symmetry, the difference being that this symmetry is not geometrically realized. Thus a Kerr black hole is an excited state of a conformal field theory. By making certain (natural) assumptions about the nature of this dual CFT we can compute its density of states. This gives a microscopic computation of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a Kerr black hole with arbitrary mass and angular momentum.