Cosmology

Group “Fundamental Interactions”

The cosmology team includes researchers with expertise in Cosmology, General Relativity, Quantum Field Theory, and Particle Physics. They collaborate and share national and international grants with several groups of theorists, cosmologists, astronomers, astrophysicists, and particle physicists.

Over the past fifteen years, an avalanche of high-quality data has transformed cosmology into a field rich in results. It has become an ideal arena for testing and potentially falsifying predictions arising from several areas of fundamental physics. This abundance of information has recently enabled the discovery of unexpected phenomena such as the acceleration of the expansion of the universe and the detection of long-sought physical signals that had previously escaped observation, such as gravitational waves.

The core of our activities is organized around three main research directions:

• Understanding the large-scale structure of the universe by studying the growth of structures in different regimes using statistical tools. Our objectives are to assess the contributions of the various forms of matter (ordinary and dark) to the processes of structure formation, and also to extract the values of the fundamental parameters of the cosmological model.
• Revealing the nature of dark energy by studying the rich phenomenology of the accelerating universe. The goal is to refine our understanding both empirically—by testing the relevance of the standard description of gravity on large scales at the present time—and theoretically—by investigating which modified gravity models could generalize the current paradigm.
• Assessing the consistency of the physical foundations of the cosmological model by testing certain fundamental assumptions made in data analysis, in order to guarantee the conceptual basis of the paradigm being used.