Internship and thesis proposals
The cosmological flow

Domaines
High energy physics
Relativity/Astrophysics/Cosmology

Type of internship
Théorique, numérique
Description
According to cosmological inflation, all the structures in the universe arise from microscopic fluctuations that were stretched to cosmological scales during a primordial epoch of accelerated expansion. Deviations from Gaussian statistics of these primordial fluctuations are a measure of the interactions of the fields active during inflation, and can help us to establish a standard model of inflationary cosmology. However, predictions for non-Gaussianities are only available in restricted classes of scenarios that are analytically tractable. The recently developed cosmological flow approach enables one to address this issue by numerically following the time evolution of primordial correlators in a systematic manner using the framework of the effective field theory of inflationary fluctuations. The student will work on extending this approach in order to predict the connected 4-point correlator, a key observable whose knowledge is also crucial to understand the properties of gravitational-wave backgrounds generated during inflation. Through this internship with both analytical and numerical approaches, the student will discover inflationary cosmology and quantum field theory in curved spacetimes.

Contact
Sébastien Renaux-Petel
Laboratory : IAP - UMR7095
Team : Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris
Team Website
/ Thesis :    Funding :