Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs), which are currently operating around the world and achieving remarkable sensitivities in the ~1--‐100 nHz band, will observe supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at redshifts z < ~1. Until now, all estimates of the anticipated signal strength of these sources have relied primarily on simulations to predict the relevant merger rates. I will present results from a completely new approach, which combines observational data and a fully self--‐consistent numerical evolution of the galaxy mass function. This method, which we will argue is superior to past estimates in several key ways, predicts a merger rate for massive galaxies that is ~10 times larger than that implied by previous calculations. I will explain why previous methods applied to this problem may systematically underestimate this merger rate, and one way in which our method may overestimate the rate, so that our approach has complementary systematic uncertainties in the worst case, and is an overall improvement in the best case. Finally, I will show that the new rate implies a range of possible signal strengths that is already in mild tension with PTA observations, with our model predicting a detection at the 95% confidence level as early as 2016. This could make PTAs the first instruments to directly detect gravitational waves, and will provide unprecedented information about the dynamics of merging galaxies, and merging bulges and supermassive black holes within those galaxies.
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) has mapped the microwave sky to arcminute scales. We present constraints on parameters from the observations at 148 and 217 GHz respectively by ACT from three years of observations. Efficient map-making and spectrum-estimation techniques allow us to probe the acoustic peaks deep into the damping tail, and allow for confirmation of the concordance model, and tests for deviations from the standard cosmological picture. We fit a model of primary cosmological and secondary foreground parameters to the dataset, including contributions from both the thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, Poisson distributed and correlated infrared sources, radio sources and a term modeling the correlation between the thermal SZ effect and the Cosmic Infrared Background. We will describe the multi-frequency likelihood for the ACT data, and present constraints on a variety of cosmological parameters using this complete dataset, and put these results in context with the recent results from the Planck satellite.
I explore the possibility that semi-classical back-reaction, due to the partners of the Hawking radiation quanta accumulating over the time for the black hole to lose about one half of its mass (the Page time), might cause the trapped surfaces to disappear, permitting unitary evolution without any cloning of quantum information.
Martin BucherFrench National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)
PIRSA:13070014
After reviewing some of the highlights of the implications of the Planck
results for cosmic inflation (presentation to be coordinated with Hiranya Peiris), I will discuss
some recent developments
regarding future searches for B modes and other new science resulting from an
ultra-precise
characterization of the microwave and far-infrared sky in polarization. I will
outline ideas for
a recently proposed large-class European Space Agency mission called PRISM.
I will overview the progress of 21cm cosmology, with emphasis on intensity mapping. Current and future experiments have the potential for precision measurements of dark energy, neutrino mass, and gravitational waves.
This talk will present an effective description of single field dark energy/modified gravity models, which encompasses most existing proposals. The starting point is a generic Lagrangian expressed in terms of the lapse and of the extrinsic and intrinsic curvature tensors of the uniform scalar field hypersurfaces. By expanding this Lagrangian up to quadratic order, one can describe the homogeneous background and the dynamics of linear perturbations. In particular, one can identify seven Lagrangian operators that lead to equations of motion containing at most second order derivatives, the time-dependent coefficients of three of these operators characterizing the background evolution. I will illustrate this approach with Horndeski's---or generalized Galileon---theories. Finally, I will discuss the link between this effective approach and observations.
The AdS/CFT correspondence provides new insights and tools to answer
previously inaccessible questions in quantum gravity. Among the most
interesting is whether it is possible to describe a cosmological
"bounce" in a mathematically complete and consistent way. In the
talk, I'll discuss joint work with M. Smolkin, developing the dual description
of the simplest possible 4d M-theory cosmology in the stringy regime, employing
the full quantum dynamics of its dual CFT. I'll also present evidence that the
description extends to the Einstein-gravity regime.
We consider the production of strongly interacting, heavy SUSY pairs at the LHC. When the centre of mass energy is close to the production threshold of the pair, the corresponding cross sections receive large higher-loop QCD corrections. These corrections are classified as the so-called soft logarithms and Coulomb singularities and they lead to a break down of the usual perturbation expansion. In this talk I review the origin of these large corrections and explain how they can be resummed by using Effective Field theories. Finally, I will present some resummed results for the pair production cross sections of heavy squarks and gluinos. Based on: arXiv:1202.2260 and 1211.3408.