Image of Alice in Wonderland at the Mad Hatter's tea party You are cordially invited to afternoon tea and biscuits wine and chocolate

Astronomy Tea Talks at Caltech

Mondays, Hameetman auditorium (Cahill)
Tea:  4.00pm
Talk: 4.15pm

Organized by:

2010 - 2011 season:
20 September 2010 Donghui Jeong (CIT)

'Search for the local type primordial non-Gaussianity from Large Scale Structure'

Cosmic inflation, which probably takes place at the very early stage of the Universe, generates the seeds of the large scale structure we observe today. Standard theories of inflation predict that the seed fluctuations follow nearly Gaussian statistics, and how exactly they deviate from Gaussianity depends on models. Interestingly, there is a consistency relation between the local type non-Gaussianity and the scale dependence of the primordial fluctuation, and every single field inflationary model has to obey this relation. Thus, if we observationally falsify this consistency relation, then we can rule out all the single field inflationary models. Traditional method of measuring the primordial non-Gaussianity is using the bispectrum of Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.
In this talk, I shall present yet another method of measuring the primordial non-Gaussianity from the large scale structure: the galaxy mass function, and the two point correlation function and the three point correlation function of galaxies. I shall also discuss the current limit on the non-Gaussianity and future prospectives with proposed/on-going surveys such as BOSS, HETDEX and Euclid, and show that the galaxy surveys are competitive method of measuring the primordial non-Gaussianity.
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Last modified on 20th Jul 2011 by Dominik A. Riechers.  

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