Cosmology seminar: Carsten van de Bruck

The properties of the CMB in the presence of non-conformal couplings to dark energy

Scalar fields remain well motivated candidates for a dark energy component. Cosmologists have recently 
begun to study quite generic scalar field theories for dark energy, in which dark energy couples to all 
energy forms. I will discuss that certain couplings of dark energy to radiation will alter the properties of 
the CMB considerably. This opens up to test so-called non-conformal couplings with future high-precision CMB 
experiments. First constraints on these types of couplings coming from the temperature-redshift relation and 
spectral distortions will be discussed.