Unveiling Cosmic Origins: The Inflationary Universe

There is much we have learned in the last century about our universe—its age, its composition, its expansive nature—but one of the most important questions in cosmology still remains unsolved: did the universe undergo a period of “cosmic inflation” in which it expanded exponentially when it was only a tiny fraction of a second old? To answer this question, cosmologists have centred their attention on the earliest light we can measure from the universe: the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), emitted when the universe was just 300,000 years old. If inflation did occur, it might have left a unique signature in the CMB—an elusive "inflationary hint." Over the past two decades, scientists have diligently scoured the CMB for this signal, but it remains elusive. In this talk, Pedro Villalba González will introduce inflation, the CMB and how humans are trying to unveil the very beginning of the universe.

Pedro Villalba González is a Spanish PhD student (Rafael del Pino Scholar and La Caixa Fellow) in the department of Physics and Astronomy at UBC. He is working in Observational Cosmology, in the deployment of a new radio telescope, the Canadian Galactic Emission Mapper, which will help us search for gravitational radiation from the very early universe.