I have recently been thinking a lot about what introductory and background material I want to include in my PhD thesis, as my self-imposed December deadline continues to hurtle towards me at an alarming speed. Concurrent with this thinking, I've also recently been enjoying a fantastic book called The Poincaré Conjecture by Donal O'Shea, all …
Continue reading Thesis off-cuts: the ancient history of general relativity
Presenting papers in journal clubs is one of my least favourite things to do. While I enjoy reading in general, I find reading academic papers a chore, especially if the writing is uninspired or the results obscured by reams of unfamiliar theory. However, papers are the currency of academia and, to stretch the analogy, journal …
At first I refrained from writing about "the situation we currently find ourselves in", as it has come to be so coyly referred to. I am lucky in that, while I was driven to leave Madrid and return to the UK, the pandemic has not affected my life in any great measure. Only one person …
Today my first paper as first author came out on the arXiv! You can check it out here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10449. In this work, we reconstruct a coupling function between dark matter and vacuum energy. Such models are generally motivated as solution to problems such as the Hubble tension, so we were keen to update our previous …
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
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
