The Cosmological Bootstrap

by Dr Hayden Lee (KICP, University of Chicago)

Tuesday 16 May 2023, 14:00 → 15:30 Asia/Seoul

1423 in building 1 (KIAS)

Title: The Cosmological Bootstrap

Speaker: Hayden Lee (KICP, University of Chicago)

Abstract: A central challenge in modern cosmology is to decode the physics of primordial fluctuations. In the inflationary paradigm, the statistics of these fluctuations are encoded in boundary correlation functions in a quasi de Sitter spacetime, which constitute the fundamental observable output of inflation.

In the past several years, a new approach has been developed to directly determine these boundary correlators from basic physical principles such as symmetry, locality, and unitarity, following a perspective familiar from the modern study of scattering amplitudes. In these lectures, I will review the key ideas behind this “cosmological bootstrap," and highlight some of the recent developments.