Research Seminars @ Illinois

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Tailored for undergraduate researchers, this calendar is a curated list of research seminars at the University of Illinois. Explore the diverse world of research and expand your knowledge through engaging sessions designed to inspire and enlighten.

To have your events added or removed from this calendar, please contact OUR at ugresearch@illinois.edu

Illuminating New Physics with Cosmic Microwave Background Observations

Event Type: Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor: Department of Astronomy
Location: 134 Astronomy Building
Virtual: Join online
Date: Sep 2, 2025 3:45 - 4:45 pm
Speaker: Dr. Cynthia Trendafilova
Contact: Daniel Franco
E-Mail: danielf9@illinois.edu
Phone: 217-300-6769
Views: 52
Originating Calendar: Astronomy Colloquium Speaker Calendar; Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provide a unique window into the early moments of our universe. Secondary effects on the CMB, such as weak gravitational lensing, further encode information about the subsequent history of our universe. Current ground-based CMB experiments have reached comparable precision on cosmological parameters to the results from the Planck satellite, and future datasets will allow us to further improve upon these measurements. In this talk, I will discuss applications of CMB datasets to detect or constrain Beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics, both alone and in combination with other cosmological probes. CMB data can be used to search for many kinds of new physics, such as light relic particles, asymmetries in neutrino species, and interactions between dark matter and other particles. I will highlight recent results on extended cosmological models from South Pole Telescope (SPT) measurements, and I will discuss the science reach that we expect from upcoming data releases and that we could expect from more futuristic ground-based millimeter-wave telescopes.

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