Newcastle Particle Cosmology Programme

The focus of Newcastle particle cosmology is to explore the interaction between cosmology and fundamental particle physics. In the very early universe, the matter underwent a series of phase transitions. Some of these may have involved the condensation of bubbles, rather like the condensation of water droplets in the atmosphere. The basic theory behind bubble nucleation in fundamental particle models is in major need of updating to keep up with new theoretical developments and ideas, such as how bubble may leave behind observational signatures or even form microscopic black holes.

In the more recent universe we are still lacking the knowledge of what particles make up most of the dark mass. One possibly is that the dark matter is in the form of a particle wave. We can simulate the formation of structure from wavelike matter using numerical simulations, but to cover the wide range of length scales we need a new approach, and the one we use uses some of the methods borrowed from particle physics. With this, we hope to predict the structures that can be compared with astronomical observations to pin down the nature of dark matter.