cosmologist
As of tomorrow, I'll have been in Madrid for two weeks! Time really does fly. The weather is still freezing and there's fresh snow on the hills behind campus (as you can hopefully see in the header image, which I took on my commute this morning). This week I made a proper start on the …
Continue reading Standard sirens, Cobaya and Beethoven's 9th: Madrid week two
Hello! If you're reading my website for the first time, I'm a third year PhD student from the University of Portsmouth, working on testing and constraining models of interacting dark energy. If you want to know more about my research, you can click here for an overview and here for some more in-depth information. However, …
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 …
