Date: Thursday, June 6, 2019
Speaker:  Marilena LoVerde (Stony Brook University)
Title: Neutrino Properties from Cosmology
Abstract: Cosmic background neutrinos are nearly as abundant as cosmic microwave background photons, but their mass, which determines the strength of their gravitational clustering, is unknown. Even if the neutrino masses are the minimum required by oscillation data, their gravitational effects on cosmological structure will nevertheless be detectable in — and in fact required to explain — data within the next decade. This presents the opportunity to detect the neutrino mass scale and test our standard cosmological model, but also to test for new physics in the dark sector. I will discuss the physical effects of neutrinos, or other hot dark matter, on structure formation, and prospects for learning about the physics these particles with future galaxy surveys and cosmic microwave background experiments.
Host:  Tien-Tien Yu