Constraining the inflationary universe from the South Pole ...

• Main Author: Fatigoni, Sofia
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2023
• Subjects: South pole
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0427409; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0427409

The standard model of cosmology (ΛCDM ) is able to statistically describe the observable Universe with a small set of parameters that have been mea- sured to a percent level precision through observations of the Cosmic Mi- crowave Background (CMB) [Aghanim et al. 2020]. While this model shows a remarkable agreement with the data, it still can’t explain all the features we observe in the CMB. One of the biggest mysteries resides on the fact that CMB radiation sky is extremely uniform in temperature, despite that it was generated when the Universe was so young that just small patches of sky could be in causal contact. As an add on to the Standard Cosmological Model the theory of inflation [Guth 1981] was introduced, to solve this set of puzzles. One prediction from Inflation is the presence of a background of gravitational waves, in the primordial Universe, that would have produced a unique parity-odd pattern in the polarization of the CMB, also known as B-Modes. Until now no CMB experiment was able to find ...