The use of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) to study the physics of the Universe is one of the greatest success stories of modern cosmology. Over the last two decades, the astonishing agreement between the theory and increasingly-precise observations of CMB temperature and polarization has led to the establishment of a concordance cosmological model. However, despite having constrained the parameters of this model to sub-percent precision, many fundamental questions about the Universe are still unanswered: we still need to find out how the Universe began, what is the nature of dark matter and dark energy, what are the properties of neutrino particles and what happened at cosmic dawn. To answer these questions new, more powerful CMB data are being collected, analysed and planned for. In this talk the speaker gives a snapshot of where we are in CMB cosmology, how we got here and where we are heading next.
Erminia Calabrese is a Professor of Astrophysics at the School of Physics and Astronomy of Cardiff University. She obtained her PhD in Rome at Sapienza University and then moved to the UK in 2011. She spent 4 years in Oxford as postdoctoral research associate and Beecroft Fellow, moved to Princeton University during 2015/2016 as Lyman Spitzer Fellow, and then back to Oxford to start an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship. In May 2017 she moved to Cardiff University to join the Astronomy Instrumentation and Astronomy & Astrophysics groups where she leads a cosmology team supported by a European Research Council Starting Grant. Erminia Calabrese works at the intersection of cosmological theory and data analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background signals, and combines the CMB with galaxy surveys to obtain state-of-the-art constraints on cosmological scenarios, including limits on neutrino physics, dark energy and inflation. She also works on the design and definition of the next generation of experiments. She is a member of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope collaboration and she chairs the Simons Observatory Theory and Analysis Committee; she also act as UK coordinator and European Deputy Spokesperson of the future LiteBIRD satellite.
Webinar was recorded on October 6, 2022