Postdoctoral Fellow
Research group | Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Main supervisor |?David Fonseca Mota
Co-supervisor |?-
Affiliation |?Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, UIO
Contact |?j.r.correia@astro.uio.no
Short bio
In May 2022 I received my Doctoral degree from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto, with a thesis titled “A New Generation of Cosmic Superstring Simulations”. In that work, the exploration of Graphics Processing Units as accelerators in cosmological field theory simulations was explored, and the world’s first GPU-accelerated cosmic string (wire-like remnants of a phase transition) simulation was presented. After this, in September 2022 I began working as a Postdoctoral Researcher for the University of Helsinki, and while I simultaneously explored using string simulations for the emission of Dark Matter, I also explored a new topic: the emission of gravitational waves (ripples in space-time) from first-order phase transitions. This challenging project allowed me to pivot to a different type of simulations, based in Hydrodynamics.
Currently I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, in the Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics center. My project continues the work develop under the above-mentioned subjects, by going beyond approximations often assumed in either type of simulations and/or by improving theoretical modelling, so we may refine our forecasts of the expected background of gravitational waves. This is of paramount importance for future observational facilities such as LISA, SKA, Einstein Telescope.
Research interests and hobbies
Early Universe sources of gravitational waves are fascinating to study and understand. My research interest lies in studying two types of these sources: first phase transitions (of the first-order kind) themselves, second remnants of such transitions (cosmic strings). Here the synergy of extreme-scale simulations, cutting edge hardware and analytical modelling is a crucial step in improving our understanding of the expected signals, for future observational efforts.
Outside of work I enjoy playing video games, card games, and painting miniatures. I am also a wine afficionado and an ok cook.
DSTrain project
Simulations of early universe phase transitions- SISYPHEAN
The advent of gravitational wave astronomy opened a new window to explore signs of new physics in the early Universe. New theories Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) of particle physics predict that phase transitions have occurred in the early Universe, and these should produce a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). If the transition involves the release of latent heat, long lived acoustic waves are produced and their rapid decay leads to gravitational waves. Apart from this, it is also possible to form a tangle of wire-like structures named cosmic strings at the phase transition itself. This tangle would emit gravitational waves over cosmic time. In both cases, the properties of the underlying phase transition (and therefore of the BSM model) can impact the signal itself. As such, both phenomena are then primary targets for future gravitational wave detectors (example: Laser Interferometer Space Antennae), and accurate modelling of the resulting SGWB is of paramount importance.
In this project I seek to go beyond the state-of-the-art - by exploring the validity of approximations oft assumed and by studying challenging numerical regimes - all the while looking to answer several long-standing issues. To this end, the very first objective is to port an existing 3D hydrodynamical simulation to modern supercomputing hardware and extend it with additional physical effects. This will allow me a thorough exploration of acoustic decay, the formation of shocks and turbulence, and the resulting SGWB. For the second objective, I intend to thoroughly study small-scale structure of populations of loops and long strings in field-theory simulations, while comparing with thin-string simulations. Here a combination of analytical and high-resolution simulations may guide us to a better understanding of which of these two approximations is more appropriate for describing the overall gravitational wave imprints of a network of cosmic strings.
Figure 1: A tangle of cosmic strings formed in an early Universe phase transition, evolves in an expanding background. These simulations ran on Finnish supercomputer LUMI. Creative Commons License 4.0
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Publications
DSTrain publications
ORCID-ID: 0000-0002-3375-0997
Previous publications
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