Multifield Cosmology: Inflation, Dark Energy and More: February 5-9, 2024

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Organizers:

• Lilia Anguelova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
• Michele Cicoli (Bologna University)
• Vivian Miranda (Stony Brook University)
• Sonia Paban (University of Texas at Austin)
• Francisco Gil Pedro (Bologna University)

Recent astronomical observations have reshaped profoundly the modern understanding of the Universe, regarding not only its contents but also its origin and future fate. The surprising discovery that, instead of decelerating, the present-day expansion of the Universe is accelerating, led to the conclusion that dark energy is currently dominating over matter and radiation. This has great implications for the future of the Universe. At the same time, the ever-more precise temperature and polarization measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation provide a window into physics at very early times (equivalently, very high energies) in the evolution of the Universe. This has enabled the more and more accurate determination of several important cosmological parameters. In addition, the recent breakthrough, in the detection of gravitational waves from black hole mergers, opens an entirely new window into gravitational physics, as well as the possibility that (a fraction of) dark matter consists of primordial black holes. All of this, together with the plethora of new observational data, that is expected in the coming years, makes it imperative to achieve better theoretical understanding of the intersection of particle physics and cosmology.

Inspired by the above, a particularly active area of research is that of multifield cosmological models arising from the coupling of many scalar fields to gravity. These models are significantly richer than single-field ones, due to the crucial role of the geometry of the scalar manifold in the multifield case. We will focus on interesting open problems in multifield cosmology such as: quantum gravity and inflation, primordial black holes and gravity waves, non-Gaussianity of the primordial perturbations, dark energy, dark matter and dark radiation.