Description:

Title: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Speaker: Andrew Long, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago
 

Abstract: As we peer out into the universe, we gaze upon enormous galaxy clusters, phenomenal collisions of black holes, a faint but ubiquitous microwave glow, and even distant worlds like our own! If we want to understand how the universe matured into the magnificent creature that it is today, we must ask how it looked when it was newly formed — in the fractions of a second after the big bang. We view the early universe through the lens of particle physics, and as we learn more about the elementary particles in the laboratory, our understanding of the universe also deepens. My research program tackles one of the universe’s biggest mysteries: Why is there more matter than antimatter? In the talk, I will highlight how advances in our understanding of the Higgs boson and the neutrinos are helping us to understand what generated the mysterious matter excess, and how future cosmological and astrophysical observations will test these theories.

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, HEP