PhD position: Building the standard model of particle cosmology

Monash University, Australia

Updated: 3 days ago

The standard model of elementary particles is one of the most successful theories in science describing all observable physical processes in the solar system, some to ten significant digits.  Similarly, the LambdaCDM model of cosmology correctly describes the key aspects of our observable universe with a high precision [1].

Excitingly, these two models have a common origin: the standard model of particle cosmology.  This mode, however, is not fully crystallised yet. Its main pillars, the particle explanation of inflation, the origin of visible and dark matter and the nature of dark energy are subject of intense research [1,2].

The aim of this project is to analyse various theories beyond the standard particle model.  These theories have specific predictions for inflation, the matter content of the universe [3], and its vacuum configuration.  These predictions will be used, in conjunction with many of their other consequences, to calculate statistical measures to quantify their plausibility using the novel CosmoBit framework [1,4].

References

[1] GAMBIT Cosmology Workgroup CosmoBit: A GAMBIT module for computing cosmological observables and likelihoods

[2] GAMBIT Cosmology Workgroup Strengthening the bound on the mass of the lightest neutrino with terrestrial and cosmological experiments

[3] Global analyses of Higgs portal singlet dark matter models using GAMBIT Eur.Phys.J.C 79 (2019) 1, 38

[4] GAMBIT Collaboration GAMBIT: The Global and Modular Beyond-the-Standard-Model Inference Tool Eur.Phys.J.C 77 (2017) 11, 784, Eur.Phys.J.C 78 (2018) 2, 98 (addendum)

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