Inflation and the Early Universe

The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is one of the experiments looking for the gravitational waves from inflation. This is a video of
SPT’s 2014 season put together by one of the winter-overs Robert Schwarz on Vimeo.

Inflation, a period of accelerating expansion in the early Universe, is a core element in the standard cosmological model. Inflation neatly solves a number of observational problems, such as: Why is the Universe flat? Why don’t we see magnetic monopoles and other relics? How can the early Universe be so uniform? Understanding inflation is a key problem in modern physics.

Supervisor Profiles & Available Research Projects

Dr Christian Reichardt

  • Searches for inflationary gravitational waves


Cosmic Microwave Background as rendered by ESA’s PLANCK Mission