Yuhsin Tsai | Cosmological Particle Production and Pairwise Hotspots on the CMB

Parallel Talk | Cosmology from Home 2023

Talk title: Cosmological Particle Production and Pairwise Hotspots on the CMB
Speaker: Yuhsin Tsai

Talk abstract:
Cosmic inflation provides an environment similar to particle colliders that can produce new particles and record the resulting signal. In this talk, I will describe a scenario in which new particles much heavier than the Hubble scale during cosmic inflation are produced via couplings to the inflaton. These heavy particles propagate classically and give rise to localized spots on the cosmic microwave background following their production. Momentum conservation during particle production dictates that these localized spots come in pairs. I will discuss the properties of such pairs of CMB spots and how convolutional neural network (CNN) techniques can be used to identify the signals from the CMB temperature fluctuations.