I work in early Universe cosmology. The Universe is pretty homogeneous and isotropic at the largest scales, as in, very distant regions of the Universe looks very similar. For example, two causally disconnected patches in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) looks practically identical. This so called 'horizon problem' is very puzzling since CMB photons from one part never had the time to interact with the other. Further, current data suggests that the Universe is flat. As Universe is ever expanding this simply means Universe was even more flat at the very early epoch. This is also very startling why Universe was so flat at the beginning. The cosmic inflation, a period of exponential expansion of the Universe, provides a graceful solution to these problems. More remarkably, as a byproduct the quantum fluctuations generated during inflation can subsequently develop into large scale structure of the Universe and the CMB  anisotropies  that we see today. In its simplest form, a slowly-rolling scalar field can induce inflation. If you are wondering whether Higgs field (which is a scalar field) can drive inflation you are cooking. Yes it can if you ignore some minor issues such as metastabliity  etc. Currently I am working in mildly modified versions of Higgs inflation such as the R^2-Higgs inflation and its possible signatures in ongoing and future experiments. You can find them here and here. We also are determining the potential of future experiments such as the Square Kilometer Array and  CMB-S4 in probing inflationary parameters in a more model independent way (see here).

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   Have you heard about antimatter? They are like ordinary matter with identical mass but typically with opposite charge. Observations suggest that our Universe is dominated by matter and not antimatter. This is why you never annihilate when you shake hand with others. We have fairly good reasons to believe Universe began with an equal amount matter and antimatter but later became matter dominated via a mechanism called baryogenesis. A plethora of mechanisms have been proposed to account this matter domination however the dynamics behind is still unknown. I am interested in one of them namely electroweak baryogenesis and its signatures in ongoing collider and low energy experiments. We discussed some unique signatures of electroweak baryogenesis in our recent publications. You can browse them here, here and here. Some of these processes are being searched by ATLAS and CMS collaboration which you can find here.

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If you are interested in early Universe cosmology and particle physics please get in touch. I would love to hear from you.

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