Title: THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND: Dark Matter, and the Early Universe

Speaker: Daniel Grin (Haverford College)

Abstract

The cosmic microwave background anisotropies offer a pristine linear system to model & explore. I will discuss what we can learn about the particle content and initial conditions of dark sectors of our universe, using observations of the cosmic microwave background. I will touch on implications for axion dark matter, dark energy, and other novel hypotheses, such as the idea that the fine-structure constant actually varies on cosmological length scales.