L. Senatore - On Effective Field Theory in Cosmology

Leonardo Senatore (Stanford University)

Observational Cosmology has made tremendous progress in the last couple of decades, allowing us to explore the beginning of the universe with unprecedented precision. Such exquisite measurements have now made us sensitive to non-linear corrections to the evolution of the density perturbations. In order to continue to address the mysteries of our universe with similar success, we have to be able to control these non-linearities.
In this context, the effective field theory paradigm represents the ideal setup to explore and systematically study the signatures that come from interactions, and additionally to directly map what we are learning from data into theory. I will describe two recent applications of this paradigm to Cosmology : the Effective Field Theory of Inflation and the Effective Field Theory of Cosmological Large Scale Structures (EFTofLSS).
Two examples are the general parametrization of fluctuations around an inflationary background and gravitational clustering of matter.

Leonardo Senatore is an Associate Professor at Stanford University. He is a theoretical cosmologist working to bridge the gap between the speculative ideas about the early universe and their possible confirmation in the data. He graduated from Scuola Normale of Pisa, received his PhD from MIT in 2006, and then was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard and the IAS in Princeton. In 2015 Leonardo was awarded the New Horizons in Physics Prize, funded by the Milner Foundation.