theoretical cosmologist
With the arrival of the new first year PhD students on Monday, I can officially class myself as a third year. It's a rather terrifying thought! The past two years have raced by in a blur of reading papers, attending conferences and wrestling with code. I'm now starting to seriously think about my post-PhD career. …
This week I travelled to Aachen on the western border of Germany for the COSMO19 conference hosted by TTK, the theoretical physics department of RWTH. The conference, which occurs yearly in different locations around the world, has a very broad scope ranging from particle astrophysics to theoretical cosmology. Conferences are an important and fun part …
At the very end of February, I published my first paper. In this post, I want to provide a brief, non-technical overview of what we* were doing in this work and the results we found. The manuscript is currently under review at MNRAS but you can view the preprint here: http://www.arxiv.org/abs/1902.10694. The aim of this …
Continue reading Constraints on the interacting vacuum — geodesic CDM scenario
I published my first paper at the end of February. I won't beat about the bush: writing this paper was exhausting. I'd had unrealistic expectations for how quickly I'd get publishable results, and consequently every delay to our draft felt like a disaster. At first we were going to be ready by July (2018). Then …
Continue reading Surviving burn out and the post-paper blues
Last week I attended the 26th annual Congres des Doctorants organised by students of the STEP'UP Doctoral School in Paris and hosted at the Institut de Physique du Globe, near the Pierre and Marie Curie campus of the Sorbonne. The doctoral school comprises physics and geosciences students from almost every university in Paris and I …
I spent the past week at the Lorentz Institute, the theoretical cosmology part of the physics community at Leiden University. My collaborators there are fellow members of CANTATA, an EU COST-Action that is mainly focused on creating and testing alternative theories of gravity, and I was awarded my second STSM (short-term scientific mission) by CANTATA …
This week I'm in the Netherlands, visiting colleagues at the Lorentz Institute at Leiden University. Leiden is a beautiful place-- a scaled-down, tourist-free version of Amsterdam-- and the institute is nice too. It's the oldest theoretical physics institute in the Netherlands and has played host to many greats of the field, including Ehrenfest, Fermi and …
