[astroseminar at Sapienza] 02/10/2018 at 16:00: Volker Bromm (SEMINARIO GENERALE)

[Elia Battistelli]

GENERAL COLLOQUIUM OF THE PHYSICS DEPARTMENT

Title: The First Billion Years of Cosmic History
Speaker:   Volker Bromm
Institution: University of Texas at Austin, U.S.A.
Date: Tuesday, 2 October 2018
Time: 4:00pm
Location: Aula Conversi, Marconi Building, Dept. of Physics, Sapienza 
University

Abstract:
The universe went through a number of fundamental transitions during 
its first billion years. The cosmological initial conditions, imprinted 
by quantum mechanical processes in the inflationary fireball, gave rise 
to the first non-linear structures, when the initial simplicity gave way 
to an ever increasing complexity. Facilitated by dark matter,  
primordial gas collapsed to form the first stars, galaxies, and black 
holes, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. I will review our 
emerging theoretical understanding of this grand cosmic transformation, 
and will discuss strategies to test our ideas with frontier observations 
from the ground and in space. An important aspect of this program is to 
harness early structure formation to probe the particle physics nature 
of the elusive dark matter.

web: https://agenda.infn.it/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=14963