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Heidelberg Researchers to Explore Universe’s Mysteries: GeoGrav’s Model-Independent Approach to Cosmology Funded by DFG
For his research project “Cosmological Geometry and Gravity with Non-linear Physics (GeoGrav),” the German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted Prof. Luca Amendola, professor of physics at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP) in Heidelberg, 340,000 euros for three years. GeoGrav will investigate fundamental questions about the universe’s geometry and gravity.
Cosmology has seen a tremendous development in recent years, driven by high-quality data from the cosmic microwave background, large-scale structure, and distance indicators. Nevertheless, several fundamental questions about our Universe are still open: What are the properties of dark energy? Is the Universe spatially flat? Is gravity Einsteinian at all scales and epochs? Often these questions are addressed within restricted classes of models, e.g. simple extensions of ΛCDM with inflationary initial conditions. In this case, the results will unavoidably depend on the model assumption. In a recent series of papers, Lucas Amendola and colleagues have shown how to reach accurate and precise cosmological conclusions regardless of assumptions about the evolution of the background, the initial conditions, the linear perturbations, and the bias functions. To achieve this, they combined non-linear correlators with distance indicators (supernovae Ia or standard sirens) as additional tracers of large-scale structure. Their new project aims at the next logical step: applying this methodology to the real data that will soon be provided by Euclid and other surveys. The ultimate goal of GeoGrav is to measure geometry and gravity at cosmological scales in a way that is both precise (high statistical significance) and accurate (weakly dependent on cosmological assumptions).
Luca Amendola is professor of physics at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. His area of research is Cosmology and Astrophysics, with a particular focus on topics related to Dark Energy, Large Scale Structure, Cosmic Microwave Background and Statistics. He is a member of the Euclid collaboration and joined the STRUCTURES Cluster of Excellence in 2024.
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