Welcome

I'm a 6th year Physics PhD student studying cosmology at the University of Texas at Austin. Very generally, my areas of interest are inflationary cosmology, quantum field theory, various cosmological puzzles like dark energy and matter.

My current research involves studying the formation and detection of non-Gaussianities in the primordial curvature perturbation. To put it slightly less technically, I'm interested in an extremely early period of the universe's history called cosmic inflation. Surprisingly, cosmic inflation has actually left us some signatures which we can observe, like anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. However, inflation is also quite mysterious because we don't know what caused it. My research will (hopefully) make progress in that area.

Recently, I have been looking at so-called non-Bunch Davies initial states. To know what this means, note that we can only predict what the world looks like, as the result of some theory, if we know it's starting point, i.e. its inital conditions. Typically, scientists have assumed the initial state had no particles of the inflation field. However, there are many reasons to question whether this is actually the case and I have been investigating the consequences of allowing for some initial particle content.

For the Fall 2012 semester, I'm visiting my advisor Eiichiro Komatsu, who recently became a director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany (15 minutes from Munich). I am about to start applying for post-docs. Wish me luck!