Cosmic microwave background experiments could probe connection between cosmic inflation, particle physics.
Various large-scale astrophysical research projects are set to take place over the next decade, several of which are so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. These are large-scale scientific efforts aimed at detecting and studying CMB radiation, which is essentially thermal radiation originating from the early universe.
Researchers at Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium recently showed that upcoming CMB observations with the Japanese LiteBIRD satellite or the primarily U.S.-funded CMB Stage 4 (CMB-S4) observatories could, by detecting primordial gravitational waves, measure the coupling of the so-called inflaton field to other particles for the first time, with further improvement possible if data from optical surveys or next-generation radio telescopes are added.
Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that this measurement could help to explore the connection between cosmic inflation and particle physics. "One of the most astonishing aspects about the Standard Model of particle physics is that it does not only describe all elementary particles found on Earth in terms of a few symmetries and a handful of numbers, but these laws also seem to be universal enough to hold in distant regions of the cosmos and in processes that happened in the first moments after the Big Bang," Marco Drewes and Lei Ming, the two authors of the paper, told Phys.org. "It is a natural question to ask how far we can go back in history with theories of particle physics—and what we can learn from the early universe about New Physics beyond the Standard Model."
The research by Drewes and Ming draws from their fascination with the connection between particle physics and cosmology. Their recent paper builds on previous studies by Drewes that first began in 2015, which laid the groundwork for Ming's PhD project. At the time of the study, Lei Ming was a visiting PhD student at UCLouvain and was part of Drewes' research group. Since then, he has graduated and started working at SYSU Guangzhou. "It is widely believed that the overall homogeneity of the observable universe is the result of a phase of accelerated cosmic expansion dubbed 'cosmic inflation' about 14 billion years ago," Drewes and Ming said. "However, it is not known how the mechanism that drove this acceleration is connected to a fundamental theory of nature, and especially to the Standard Model of particle physics. An important key could be provided by the imprint of 'cosmic reheating' in the CMB." Cosmic reheating is the process through which the early universe was filled with a hot plasma, following its cooling by the inflationary expansion. This process ultimately established the initial conditions for the "hot Big Bang," which resulted in the formation of the universe as we know it. Some previous studies had already explored the possibility of constraining the universe's initial temperature using CMB data. Yet the study by Drewes and Ming takes this one step further, investigating the extent to which this data could contain insight about the connection between CMB and particle physics.
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