University College London
I'm a fourth year PhD student in Mathematics at University College London (UCL)
working in areas of theoretical physics and applied mathematics.
I am based in the Mathematics department and part of the
Mathematical Physics research group (more specifically, General Relativity and Cosmology).
Before coming to UCL, I studied theoretical physics at the University of Nottingham. My current research focusses on theories of modified gravity
and their associated symmetries. I'm also looking at applications in cosmology and black hole spacetimes.
My supervisor here at UCL is Dr. Christian Böhmer.
In my recent work Modified gravity: a unified approach to metric-affine models [2301.11051 gr-qc] we study theories that break diffeomorphism invariance in metric-affine spaces. In a simple cosmological example, we show that torsion can propagate even without sources, akin to gravitational waves in standard GR. The figure shows the effects of torsion, where it acts to drive inflation at early times, but dies off at late times.
A phase space plot in the context of scalar field cosmology. The different coloured paths show trajectories with different initial conditions, whilst the different points represent fixed points of the system. All trajectories end up at the global attractor corresponding to an accelerated exponential expansion. This particular example is for a power-law potential model, from my work Scalar Fields in Cosmology: A Dynamical Systems Approach.
A figure taken from our paper Modified gravity: a unified approach [2103.15906 gr-qc] looking at generalising modified geometric theories of gravity by focussing on the unique boundary terms relating each theory. The bottom two arrows of the figure point to the popular modifications f(T) and f(Q) gravity, showing that they can be reconstructed from this more general setup. The work also looks at the role of fundamental symmetries such as diffeomorphism invariance.
Evolution of cosmological parameters in second-order modified theories of gravity, taken from our paper Cosmological dynamical systems in modified gravity [2201.09588 gr-qc]. The x-axis is the radiation density parameter, whilst the y-axis is proportional to the Hubble parameter. By analysing the trajectories on the phase space, one can obtain a qualitative picture for the evolution of these physical parameters. The different phase spaces are for different values of free parameters in a specific model, and the points Pn represent de-Sitter points (i.e. where the universe undergoes accelerated expansion).