Physical Society Colloquium

Primordial non-Gaussianity in the CMB and Large-Scale Structure

Kendrick Smith

Perimeter Institute

I'll give a pedagogical review of inflation and explain how its physics can be constrained by searching for “primordial non-Gaussianity”, i.e. differences between the statistics of the initial curvature field in our universe and the statistics of an ideal Gaussian field. Then I'll talk about observational CMB constraints, including recent results from Planck. Finally I'll discuss future prospects for improving Planck constraints with large-scale surveys such as Euclid and LSST.