Abstract Details

Name: Rishi Khatri
Affiliation: TIFR, Mumbai
Conference ID: ASI2017_1483
Title : Information hidden in the CMB spectral distortions
Authors and Co-Authors : -
Abstract Type :
Abstract Category : Plenary
Abstract : Planck is the first full sky experiment, 25 years after COBE, with sufficient frequency coverage to shed new light on the CMB spectral distortions. COBE-FIRAS estabished that the CMB spectrum is blackbody to better than 1 part in 10^4. In standard cosmological model, we expect inevitable distortions at the level of 10^-8 (accessible to the next generation of CMB experiments) which can shed new light on the early Universe. I will briefly review the processes responsible for the maintaining the blackbody spectrum of CMB in the early Universe. I then go on to describe how these processes fail one by one with time allowing the deviations from the equilibrium spectrum to be possible. I conclude by touching on what we can learn from measurement of these deviations in the future and some actual results using the Planck data.