Cosmologists are close to the rational laws of the Big Bang

Thinking says the universe started off pretty smooth overall, but quantum rocks space imprinted with tiny bits of excess matter. As space expanded, these dense patches stretched even as small ripples continued to appear. When inflation stopped, the young universe was left with dense patches ranging from small to large, which would become galaxies and galaxy clusters.

All inflation theories prove the two-point correlation function. To distinguish between competing theories, researchers need to measure the finer and higher point correlations – for example the relationships between angles formed by a trio of galaxies.

Cosmologists usually propose an inflation theory that involves certain exotic particles, then play it forward to calculate the three-point correlation functions they will leave in the sky, giving astronomers a target to look for. In this way, researchers process the theories one by one. “There are many, many possible things you can look for. Infinitely many, actually,” said Dan Meyerberg, a cosmologist at the University of Groningen.

This process is not paid. Inflation is thought to have left ripples in the fabric of space in the form of gravitational waves. Bager and his collaborators began with all three possible point functions to describe these gravitational waves and examined them with the matrix test, ruling out any functions that failed in the unit.

In the case of a certain type of gravitational wave, the group found that the functions of the three unitary points are few and far between. In a preliminary version published in September, the researchers announced that only three of them passed the test. Meyerberg, who was not at the conference, said the result was “absolutely impressive”. If astronomers detect primordial gravitational waves — and efforts are ongoing — these will be the first signs of inflation to look for.

positive signs

Optical cosmological theory ensures that the sum of the probabilities of all possible events amounts to 1, just as surely a coin has two sides. But there is another way to think about unity: the probabilities of each event must be positive. No currency can have a negative chance of landing on its tails.

Victor Gorbenko, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University, Lorenzo Di Pietro at the University of Trieste in Italy, and Shota Komatsu at CERN in Switzerland recently approached unity in de Sitter space from this perspective. And they wondered, what would the sky look like in the alien universes that broke this law of positivity?

Inspired by Escher’s world, they were intrigued by the fact that anti-de Sitter space and de Sitter space share one basic feature: if displayed correctly, they can both look the same on all scales. Zoom near the Escher . border Circle boundary III Wood chops, and shrimp have similar proportions to the large portions in the middle. Likewise, quantum ripples in the bloated universe generated large and small dense patches. This common property, “conformal symmetry”, recently allowed Taruna, who was working with Charlotte Slate, a theoretical physicist at Durham University in the UK, to develop a popular mathematical technique for breaking the boundary theories between the two worlds.

Gorbenko’s group developed the instrument, which allowed them to take the end of inflation in any universe – a mixture of density ripples – and break it down into a set of wave-like patterns. They found that for the unified universes, each wave would have a positive coefficient. Any theories that predict negative waves will not be good. They described the test in a preliminary version in August. Meanwhile, an independent group led by Joao Benedonnes of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne came to the same conclusion.

The positivity test is more accurate than the optical cosmological theory, but is less prepared for real data. Both positive groups did a work of simplification, including abstracting gravity and assuming a flawless de Sitter structure, which would need tweaking to fit our chaotic and attractive universe. But Gorbenko calls these steps “concrete and actionable”.

Reason for hope

Now that bootstrappers are close to the idea of ​​what unity looks like in relation to the result of the de Sitter expansion, they can move on to other classic bootstrap rules, such as expecting that causes should come before effects. It’s currently not clear how to see the effects of causation in an immortal shot, but the same was once true for loneliness.

“This is the most exciting thing we still don’t fully understand,” Taruna said. “We don’t know what is causal in de Sitter.”