For my final project for my cosmology class, I numerically investigated single-field scalar inflation. The potential I used, quadratic inflation, has been ruled out by Planck but it was still nice to do the calculations of the spectral index and tensor-to-scalar ratio and see I get the same results. I then used Monte Carlo to …
I presented a group talk for my QFT II class on Peskin and Schroeder section 16.6, explaining the background field method and using it to derive the QCD beta function. I found the section in P&S to be utterly incomprehensible–they don’t really give you any clues to what they’re doing or how anything is defined …
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I gave a talk at the UM HET journal club on the Extended Press-Schechter formalism, which describes the number density distribution of halos (galaxy clusters) in ΛCDM. It starts from basic cosmology but assumes some results from inflationary theory without demonstration. The Press-Schechter formalism was a mildly accurate formalism with some problems; these problems are resolved …
I gave a presentation in PHYS 510 Statistical Mechanics on the phase transition aspects of the Higgs Mechanism. It’s at a pretty basic level and anyone with a bit of quantum field theory knowledge should be able to follow. The slides are here.
