Dear colleagues,

a reminder that a Theory Center Meeting is scheduled for next friday, 26-8-2011. As usual, please register at

http://www.nikhef.nl/pub/theory/registration/index.php

Morning talk is tba.

Best wishes, Eric

Agenda August 26

* Time: 10.00 - 17.00 * Talk 10.30 - 10.45, H320 pre-talk question session * Talk 10.45-11.15, H320 TBA

* Time: 15.00 - 16.00 Student meeting/discussion Daan Meerburg: "non-Gaussianities "

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is believed to a direct relic of quantum fluctuations during inflation. Investigating the distribution of temperature fluctuations in the CMB should shed more light on the physics of inflation. As it turns out, the observed distribution of temperature fluctuations in the CMB is very close to Gaussian, which can be described, to first order, by only two parameters; the variance and the change of variance as a function of scale. These two parameters can be related to predictions made by inflation through the power and the tilt of the primordial distribution of curvature perturbations. I will talk through some of the physics involved in connecting theoretical predictions to the observations. Many models of inflation yield very similar values of these two parameters, making it difficult to verify or falsify those models. Ideally, we would like to extract additional information (parameters) from the CMB. I will discuss two possibilities: looking for higher order corrections to the scale dependence of the variance of fluctuations (the 2 point correlation function), and looking for higher correlation statistics (3 point correlation and beyond), probing possible deviations from Gaussianity.

* Talk 16.15-16.30-17.00, H320 Jamil Hetzel " Probing the supersymmetry breaking mechanism using renormalisation group invariants"

* 17.00 Borrel _______________________________________________ Theory-center mailing list Theory-center@nikhef.nl https://mailman.nikhef.nl/mailman/listinfo/theory-center