Daniel Pfeffer with Claudia de Rham
The Accelerating Universe and Vacuum Energy
During his senior project, Daniel Pfeffer will investigate the acceleration of the Universe. He will explore whether or not it is possible to screen the effect of a large vacuum energy and give rise the amount of acceleration currently observed by supernovae and other probes. Some scalar field models have been proposed that can dynamically adapt for a large vacuum energy. If such dynamics exist, it will be interesting to study their stabilities and their observational signatures.