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Research Interests |
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I am interested in investigating extended models of the Universe, to see if they could answer some of the questions that we face with the concordance LCDM model.
My PhD thesis invovled investigating a specific class of modified LCDM models, the coupled dark energy model, and its potential to alleviate tensions in cosmology. Coupled quintessence, or coupled dark energy (CDE) cosmologies propose a mechanism whereby dark matter particles feel a fifth force mediated by a scalar field which plays the role of dark energy. The strength of the coupling between the scalar field and the dark matter particles can be encapsulated by the coupling parameter, which in past literature has been generally assumed to take on a constant value. However, we wish to extend this framework by allowing the coupling to evolve with redshift and investigating the effects of such a tomographic CDE model. To this end, I have developed a modified version of the Boltzmann code CLASS to allow for a tomographic coupling, and used a variety of high and low redshift datasets to derive upper bounds on the value of coupling at different epochs. We found that Large Scale Structure data (galaxy clustering, 3x2pt) can strongly constrain coupling at low redshifts.
I am part of the Euclid Consortium, where, as a member of the Inter-Science Taskfoce: Likelihood (IST:L), I contribute to the development of the Euclid likelihood code, Cosmology Likelihood for Observables in Euclid (CLOE). We have built a fully pythonic library based on Cobaya and CosmoSIS, to perform Bayesian likelihood inference and obtain constraints on the cosmological parameters given Euclid data.
I am also part of the Ultraviolet Near-Infrared Optical Northern Survey (UNIONS) collaboration, which brings together 3 ground-based photometric telescopes in Hawaii that, when completed, will provide the largest galaxy map in the northern hemisphere to date. I have worked on developing the likelihood inference pipeline to derive cosmological constraints with UNIONS cosmic shear data, from conducting tests on the galaxy catalogue to finally delivering a robust analysis pipeline for one of the last Stage-III weak lensing surveys.
In the first two years of my PhD, I was involved in the PHC Pessoa Exchange with the Costar lab at CENTRA, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon. Within this partnership, we synergised our respective expertise by collaboratively working on a research project of constraining early coupled quintessence models.