13 July 2021

Current trends in gravitation Seminar

Location: University Oldenburg - Online
When: 13.7.2021, 16:15 CEST

Speaker: Vincent Vennin (Laboratoire Astroparticule & Cosmologie (APC) Paris, France)

Title: Can we prove that cosmic structures are of quantum mechanical origin?

Abstract: During inflation, quantum vacuum fluctuations are amplified and stretched to large distances, giving rise to cosmological over-densities that seed the large-scale structure of our Universe. However, astronomers usually analyse the data with purely classical techniques and apparently never need to rely on the quantum formalism to understand them. So are there observational signatures of the quantum origins of inflationary perturbations? Can inflation be used to test fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics itself?