Echoes Of The Big Bang: Probing The Origin Of Our Cosmos

While recent technological advances have allowed us to retrace over 13 billion years of cosmic history, unveiling the birth of our Universe remains one of the most fundamental challenges of modern astronomy. The leading theory of cosmic inflation postulates a sudden burst of expansion in the first instant after the Big Bang, during which the laws of quantum physics determined the subsequent large-scale evolution of the cosmos. This talk will take the audience on a journey through space and time, outlining how the detection of light from the edge of the observable Universe can bring us closer to understanding this critical fraction of a second. Emilie will introduce the Simons Observatory, a new set of telescopes built in the Atacama Desert to target these primordial signals with unprecedented sensitivity. Finally,we will touch upon a fascinating implication of inflation theory: the hypothesis that our Universe might only be a bubble expanding within a larger multiverse. With new prospects for emulating similar bubbles in the lab using quantum technologies, the next decade may yield fundamental breakthroughs leading us to rethink our place in the cosmos.

Emilie Hertig is a final-year PhD student in Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at EPFL, in her home country of Switzerland, specializing in theoretical physics. Her first research project, carried out during an exchange year in Vancouver (Canada), focused on measuring the expansion rate of the Universe to shed light on dark energy. Her master’s thesis consisted of searching for extensions of General Relativity in gravitational wave signals. In Cambridge, she is conducting research at the boundary of cosmology and quantum field theory, in a multidisciplinary effort to unveil cosmic origins..

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