MSCA-IF: Joint application at the University of Granada. Department of Theoretical Physics and Physics of the Cosmos

Professor Mar Bastero Gil, from the Department of Theoretical Physics and Physics of the Cosmos at the University of Granada, welcomes postdoctoral candidates interested in applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (MSCA-IF) in 2018 at this University. Please note that applicants must comply with the Mobility Rule (more information: http://sl.ugr.es/09Qg).

Brief description of the institution:

The University of Granada (UGR), founded in 1531, is one of the largest and most important universities in Spain. It serves more than 60000 students per year, including many foreign students, as UGR is the leader host institution in the Erasmus program. UGR, featuring 3650 professors and more than 2000 auxiliary personnel, offers a total of 75 degrees through its 112 departments and 28 centers.

UGR is also a leading institution in research, located in the top 5/10 of Spanish universities by a variety of ranking criteria, such as national R&D projects, fellowships awarded, publications, or international funding. UGR is one of the few Spanish Universities listed in the Shanghai Top 500 ranking (http://www.arwu.org/), and it is also well recognized for its web presence (http://www.4icu.org/top200/).

Internationally, we bet decidedly by our participation in the calls of H2020, both at partner and coordination. For the duration of the Seventh Framework Programme, the UGR has obtained a total of 66 projects, with total funding of 17.97 million euros, and for H2020, until 2015, more than 25 projects with total funding of more than 6 million euros. Our more than 3,000 researchers are grouped into 365 research groups covering all scientific fields and disciplines.

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group

The members of the research group are  part of the CAFPE institute (https://cafpe.ugr.es/index.php?lang=en). The initials CAFPE stand for “Centro Andaluz de Física de Partículas Elementales”, in English “Andalucian Center for Elementary Particle Physics”. Our goals are:

• Encourage the formation of a complex of research excellence especially those oriented lines in particle physics research.
• Participate with their facilities and personnel in interdisciplinary research projects in collaboration with other research centers and companies in Andalucia.
• Organize specialized courses and scientific meetings on matters within its competence.

Our lines of research are:

• Basic theoretical and experimental science in the field of physics. 
• Particle Physics, Astroparticle and Nuclear.
• Cosmology and the Early Universe. 
• Large accelerators and particle detectors.

Project description

Our main lines of research are on the subject of General Relativity and Cosmology, according to the experience of the team members and collaborators. These are the natural continuation of the research activities developed until now, and motivated by recent observational data in the field. We mainly focus on the study of the Early Universe, and in particular: (a) inflationary models and the effect of the inflaton interactions on the predictions and comparison with recent and future data; (b) study of the gravitational wave spectrum generated both during inflation and reheating.  We aim to apply our expertize in the field of inflation to focus on the observational implications of the inflationary phase, and study in detail the subsequent period of reheating to identify possible signals detectable in future experiments/observations, like large galaxies surveys and gravity waves experiment (LIGO/VIRGO, and the future LISA, DECIGO, BBO). If inflation happened through a scalar field, this field cannot be an isolated entity, but must belong to the particle physics model describing nature. The purpose is to identify potential signals of its interactions within the cosmological observables.

We are also interested in other aspects of the interplay between Cosmology and Particle Physics, like identifying the nature of Dark Matter through their cosmological signatures; the generation of the matter-antimatter asymmetry; and the dark energy problem.

Research Area

• Physics and Mathematics (PHY-MAT)

For a correct evaluation of your candidature, please send the documents below to Professor Mar Bastero Gil (mbg@ugr.es):

• CV
• Letter of recommendation (optional)