Professional Summary
I am a third year PhD student working with Professor Jahmour Givans in the cosmology group here at UC. Dark energy influences the distribution of matter in the universe, along with other quantities such as dark matter, the sum of neutrino masses and the universe's initial conditions. Extracting this information from large-scale structures entails comparing summary statistics of cosmological observations, most commonly the power spectrum, with theory predictions, which can help us understand the properties of dark energy. This provides useful insight into structure formation and improves the statistical uncertainty on cosmological parameters.
We are studying the Lyman-α forest, which is a series of absorption dips in a quasar's spectrum, where each dip in flux is a Ly-α transition of neutral hydrogen. The Ly-α forest is a high redshift (z ~ 2–5) tracer of multi-scale matter clustering, bridging the gap between CMB and galaxy surveys. Using Quijote, an N-body simulation suite that spans across a range of cosmologies, we can study how the 1D power spectra respond to various parameters, including neutrino mass and dark energy. Next steps include training ML algorithms with the statistical data from these simulations, and performing higher-order statistical analysis for non-Gaussian information.
Education
B.Sc: Ohio Wesleyan University (Astrophysics)
M.Sc: Bowling Green State University (Semiconductor Physics)