Hael Collins
Department of Physics
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, United States

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     My research investigates the fields of cosmology and quantum field theory.   I am especially interested in understanding the properties of the very early universe, where these two subjects come together.   The early universe is one of the great frontiers of human knowledge, and our quest for how the universe came to be as we observe it today is intimately related to another frontier, the search for the fundamental laws and constituents of nature.   This second frontier has been pushed forward by nearly a century of work which as been most recently rewarded with the discovery of the Higgs particle.   But the era of precision observations of the early universe, being carried out by WMAP, Planck, and many other experiments, is still in its youth, and cosmology will continue to be an area of intense exploration and discovery for many decades.
     My own contributions to these subjects have been to create new methods and formalisms for studying both quantum fields and cosmology.   My approach uses the tools of effective field theory to look for and to model possible new physical phenomena.   Most recently I have found new techniques for treating the structures in the state of a quantum field using the language of effective field theory.   These more general quantum states have applications in inflation; they should also be useful for describing condensed matter systems where, unlike a scattering experiment, we might wish to start in some general excited state.