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2022 Ta-You Wu Lecture
in Physics
Eiichiro Komatsu, Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics
Wednesday, October 19, 2022
4:00-5:00 PM
Location: Rackham Amphitheatre
University of Michigan Ann Arbor Campus
Seating Begins at 3:30 PM!
This event was also live-streamed on YouTube.
Finding Cosmic Inflation
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) gives a photographic image of the Universe when it was still an “infant,” and its detailed measurements have given us a wealth of information, such as the composition and history of the Universe. The CMB research told us a remarkable story: the structure we see in our Universe, such as galaxies, stars, planets, and eventually ourselves, originated from tiny quantum fluctuations in the period of early Universe called “cosmic inflation.” But is this picture true? In this lecture, I will review the physics of CMB and key results from recent experiments and discuss future prospects for the quest to find out about our origins.
Biographical Sketch for Professor Eiichiro Komatsu
Professor Eiichiro Komatsu uses theoretical physics and observational data to study the origin, evolution, and constituents of our Universe. Since 2012, he has been Director of the Department of Physical Cosmology at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Director of Texas Cosmology Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. from Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan) in 2001.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Nishinomiya-Yukawa Memorial Prize, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the Lancelot M. Berkeley Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Chushiro Hayashi Prize of the Astronomical Society of Japan, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and the Inoue Prize for Science.
His scientific achievements include the most stringent test of the physics of the very early Universe known as “cosmic inflation”; innovative explorations of dark matter, dark energy and neutrinos in cosmology; and the astrophysics of galaxy clusters.
