MIT Kavli Institute Directory

Professor Edmund Bertschinger's group develops and applies analytical, computational, and statistical methods to improve our understanding of gravitation and cosmology.  Their main research topics are:

• Dark matter: improving our understanding of how it clusters to form galaxies and larger structures, investigating its detectability in the cosmos and laboratory
• Dark energy: phenomenology of theories of dark energy and their cosmological tests
• Testing general relativity, especially in cosmology
• Developing consistent modified gravity theories and developing observational tests of them
• Other topics in theoretical physics and cosmology, e.g. cosmological perturbation theory, scalar fields and neutrinos in cosmology, parallel computation

Group members:  graduate student David Hernandez and postdoc Chanda Prescod-Weinstein



Potential and density for a mixed cold+hot dark matter model with Omega_hot = 0.2. A slice of size 50 Mpc/h is shown. Upper left: Newtonian potential at the end of inflation. Upper right: potential at the end of recombination. Lower left: density at the end of recombination. Lower right: density at redshift 0.