Theory HEP Seminar

Gravitational Imprints of Early Matter Domination

Jessie Shelton

UIUC

A wide range of well-motivated models, such as post-inflationary reheating, moduli, and decoupled hidden sectors, can easily and generically give rise to epochs of early matter domination prior to BBN. The potentially observable consequences of such early departures from radiation domination depend on the properties of both dark matter and the species that controls the universe's expansion.  I'll talk about the gravitational consequences of an era of modified cosmic expansion, maps to the particle physics of decoupled hidden sectors that can realize such eras, and the features in the (linear) matter power spectrum, with an eye toward observability, and conclude with some preliminary comments about gravitational wave emission.