ABBL-iTHEMS Joint Astro Seminar by Derek Beattie Inman on November 24, 2023

Cosmological observations have led to an extremely precise understanding of the large-scale structure of the Universe. A common assumption is to extrapolate large-scale properties to smaller scales; however, whether this is correct or not is unknown and many well-motivated early Universe scenarios predict substantially different structure formation histories. In this seminar Derek discussed two scenarios where nonlinear structures form much earlier than is typically assumed. In the first case, the initial fluctuations are enhanced on small scales leading to either primordial black holes clusters or WIMP minihalos right after matter-radiation equality. In the second, Derek showed that an additional attractive dark force leads to structure formation even in the radiation dominated Universe. Derek furthermore discussed possible observations of such early structure formation including changes to the cosmic microwave background, dark matter annihilation, and when the first galaxies form.

Reported by Shigehiro Nagataki