The first direct measurement of gravitational waves by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations has opened up new avenues to explore our Universe. This white paper outlines the challenges and gains expected in gravitational-wave searches at frequencies above the ...
A metastable cosmic-string network is a generic consequence of many grand unified theories (GUTs) when combined with cosmic inflation. Metastable cosmic strings are not topologically stable, but decay on cosmic time scales due to pair production of GUT mon ...
In the presence of magnetic fields, gravitational waves are converted into photons and vice versa. We demonstrate that this conversion leads to a distortion of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which can serve as a detector for MHz to GHz gravitationa ...
We study inflation driven by the Higgs field in the Einstein-Cartan formulation of gravity. In this theory, the presence of the Holst and Nieh-Yan terms with the Higgs field non-minimally coupled to them leads to three additional coupling constants. For a ...
Wave phenomena manifest in nature as electromagnetic waves, acoustic waves, and gravitational waves among others.
Their descriptions as partial differential equations in electromagnetics, acoustics, and fluid dynamics are ubiquitous in science and engineer ...
The purpose of this Thesis is to develop, test, and characterize different models attempting to tackle the problem of measurement of galaxy shapes applied in interferometric observations. Shape measurement is a tool for estimating the underlying shear due ...
The analysis of weak gravitational lensing in wide-field imaging surveys is considered to be a major cosmological probe of dark energy. Our capacity to constrain the dark energy equation of state relies on an accurate knowledge of the galaxy mean redshift ...
The increasing population and the consequential demand for dwelling and recreation areas lead to more frequent conflicts between humans and natural hazards. In mountainous regions snow avalanches are, therefore, still a major threat to humans and infrastru ...
Aims. We introduce a novel approach to reconstructing dark matter mass maps from weak gravitational lensing measurements. The cornerstone of the proposed method lies in a new modelling of the matter density field in the Universe as a mixture of two compone ...
We interpret the recent NANOGrav results in terms of a stochastic gravitational wave background from metastable cosmic strings. The observed amplitude of a stochastic signal can be translated into a range for the cosmic string tension and the mass of magne ...
Cosmic string networks offer one of the best prospects for detection of cosmological gravitational waves (GWs). The combined incoherent GW emission of a large number of string loops leads to a stochastic GW background (SGWB), which encodes the properties o ...
Dark matter (DM) can consist of very light bosons behaving as a classical scalar field that experiences coherent oscillations. The presence of this DM field would perturb the dynamics of celestial bodies, either because the (oscillating) DM stress tensor m ...