Richard Easther, University of Auckland

"Darkest Before The Dawn: Exploring the Very Early Universe"

Abstract: The visible universe is 60 orders of magnitude larger than the Planck length, offering a rough lower bound on its overall expansion since the Big Bang. In typical theories, inflation accounts for 30 of these 60 “decades" and during the next 15 decades typical interaction energies are above the TeV scale. It is only for the last 15 decades that we can assume that the contents of the Universe are described by the Standard Model, together with the dark sector. In contrast to the final 15 decades of growth, which take roughly 13.8 billion years, the middle phase lasts just a trillionth of a second. Despite its brevity, this epoch can host a complex range of nonlinear phenomena. In particular, I will explain how it can support gravitationally-driven “structure formation” from the collapse of self-gravitating quantum matter. Despite their different scales, we can use insights and techniques from studies of galaxy formation to understand such a phase, and I will discuss possible fingerprints from this era that might be visible today.