Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics | 2017 Jul 19
[img3="Physicists are capitalizing on a direct connection between the largest cosmic structures and the smallest known objects to use the universe as a "cosmological collider" and investigate new physics.
New research finds how the properties of subatomic elementary particles, visualized in the middle of this artist's impression, may be imprinted in the largest cosmic structures visible in the universe, shown on either side. (Credit: Paul Shellard)"]https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/sites/www.c ... 1/base.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
The three-dimensional map of galaxies throughout the cosmos and the leftover radiation from the Big Bang – called the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – are the largest structures in the universe that astrophysicists observe using telescopes. Subatomic elementary particles, on the other hand, are the smallest known objects in the universe that particle physicists study using particle colliders.
A team including Xingang Chen of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Yi Wang from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and Zhong-Zhi Xianyu from the Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications at Harvard University has used these extremes of size to probe fundamental physics in an innovative way. They have shown how the properties of the elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics may be inferred by studying the largest cosmic structures. This connection is made through a process called cosmic inflation. ...
Standard Model Background of the Cosmological Collider - Xingang Chen, Yi Wang, Zhong-Zhi Xianyu
- Physical Review Letters 118:261302 (29 Jun 2017) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.261302
arXiv.org > hep-th > arXiv:1610.06597 > 20 Oct 2016 (v1), 30 Jun 2017 (v3)