John Dulin with Glenn Starkman

Hearing the Shape of the Universe

The past few years of work on discerning the topology of the universe have focused on methods like cosmic crystallography and circles-in-the-sky searches, as well as examinations of the correlation matrix to uncover manifolds with non-trivial topology.  While helping to constrain the universe’s possible topologies, these hunts have not discovered the ultimate universal shape.   This project aims to extend that investigation to a broader set of topological spaces, including some deformations of known manifolds, and some non-manifolds, using known methods — circles and correlation function comparisons.  The ultimate goal is to generalize the existing methods to one that works by detecting the discreteness of the Fourier spectrum in a cosmologically non-trivial space.