Jerome Quintin completed his PhD at McGill University in 2019, and after that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam, Germany. Jerome has been at the University of Waterloo since 2022, holding the Faculty of Mathematics Prestigious Postdoctoral Fellowship. His research focuses on cosmology and gravity, ranging from more formal to more phenomenological aspects, with a particular interest in the very early universe.
Title: Update on Primordial Standard Clocks
Abstract: In this talk, I will argue that we need to find new observables that could allow us to discriminate between theories of the very early universe. I will show how primordial standard clocks could achieve this — they are oscillatory features in the primordial correlations due to heavy spectator fields present in the sub-horizon evolution of inflation or alternatives thereof. I will present recent developments of an ongoing project in which we performed the first complete modelling and computation of standard clocks in an alternative to inflation. Our results support the idea that particular features in the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure data could tell inflation apart from its competitors in a model-independent way, thus putting whole paradigms to the test.