Astro Seminar Series

Alice Pisani is a cosmologist working at Princeton University. Her work focuses on using the large-scale structure of the Universe, and in particular the under-dense regions known as cosmic voids, to constrain cosmological models. She is a member of WFIRST, PFS and Euclid. 

Title and Abstract for Alice’s talk:

Cosmology with cosmic voids: status and recent results

Modern surveys allow us to access to high quality measurements on large areas in the sky and span large redshift ranges—thus sampling the galaxy distribution in detail also in the emptier regions, voids. Void cosmology is hence becoming an increasingly active sector of galaxy clustering analysis: by measuring void properties, such as the abundance or the density profiles, it is possible to constrain cosmological parameters. The void perspective is particularly promising to better understand dark energy and test modifications of the laws of General Relativity. In this talk I illustrate the use of cosmic voids as a tool for cosmology, I present the status and recent developments of void cosmology and I discuss the constraining power of voids to be observed by upcoming surveys.