Decoding Primordial Fluctuations

abstract:

I will review our current understanding of the initial conditions of the universe, and describe what information is available from current and future measurements of cosmological correlation functions. Then I will describe a new method I developed to compute and constrain the possible shapes of those correlation functions, assuming they were generated during an inflationary era. This "cosmological bootstrap” draws inspiration from the modern scattering amplitudes program in flat space, as well as the conformal bootstrap of phase transitions. A thorough understanding of the fluctuations will give us insight into particle physics at very high energy scales and may provide a window into the nature of spacetime itself.