On monday at 9AM Arizona time, there will be a press conference at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics to announce a major discovery in astrophysics. There have been a lot of rumors going around that this discovery will be the detection of a type of polarization anisotropy signal in the cosmic microwave background that is an imprint of primordial gravitational waves generated by a period of superfast expansion of space very early in the universe called inflation. This signal has been predicted to exist but its level and properties were not very strongly constrained. If it indeed is there and has been detected with high significance then the measurements will constrain models of cosmology and particle physics at very high energy scales, close to the energies where the forces of nature naturally should unite in a grand unified theory. The experiments likely to be reporting these measurements are the BICEP2/KECK collaboration which has deployed a set of small CMB telescopes from the South Pole for the last 4 years.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 18:57:55 +0000
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