DR. ASEEM PARANJAPE

Understanding the origin and evolution of the so-called Cosmic Web is one of the oldest questions in modern cosmology. With the advent of deep, wide-field galaxy surveys, this question has become intimately connected with more fundamental ones such as the origin of dark energy or the nature of the initial phase of inflation. Quantities which encapsulate our understanding of the former – such as the mass function and clustering properties of gravitationally bound dark matter halos – are now potentially tools that can also help us answer the latter. The speaker will discuss recent advances in our analytical understanding of these tools, which in principle open up several means of exploiting the large quantities of data that are becoming available. On a sobering note, these advances also highlight that we cannot yet fully answer a basic question: Where does gravitational collapse occur? The speaker will discuss some possible ways forward in building a more complete analytical understanding of the locations of collapse.