Evolving Potentials

An important event of the early summer was the graduation of my most senior graduate student - Alessandra Silvestri - who successfully defended her thesis on May 15th, and who is leaving the nest at the end of the summer to take up a postdoc in the Physics Department and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT. Congratulations to Alessandra! Alessandra's thesis - Modified Gravity: Cosmic Acceleration and the Large Scale Structure of the Universe - contains, among other things, results obtained in a series of papers in which she, with collaborators, studied how one might search for an observational signature of modified gravity as the origin of cosmic acceleration, as compared to dark energy, or a cosmological constant. While it is relatively easy to obtain the correct expansion history of the universe - how its size changes over the course of time - from all kinds ...