Central European Institute for Cosmology and Fundamental Physics
 

Ignacy Sawicki

PhD:  University of Chicago, 2007
   
2016-  Institute of Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences,
Senior Researcher
2014-16 University of Geneva; Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow
2014 AIMS, Cape Town; Visiting Researcher
2010-13 ITP, University of Heidelberg; Postdoc
2007-10  CCPP, New York University; James Arthur Fellow
   
Email: ignacy.sawicki@fzu.cz
Phone: +420 26605 2175
Address:   Office 232
Na Slovance 1999/2
182 21 Praha 8, Czech Republic

The last two decades of observations have confirmed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing down, as we had expected from the fact that gravity in an attractive force. This mechanism behind this effect is called dark energy.

A simple explanation for dark energy is a cosmological constant, a fundamental property of space time. But could there be a dynamical mechanism responsible for the acceleration? I am interested in searching for such dynamical dark energy models (originating from a modification of gravity or some other mechanism), understanding the extent to which these models can be consistent, and finding methods to discriminate between them that can be used with data from current and upcoming cosmological surveys.

Selected Publications

  • E. Bellini and I. Sawicki, Maximal freedom at minimum cost: linear large-scale structure
    in general modifications of gravity

    JCAP (2014) [arXiv:1404.3713 [astro-ph.CO]]
  • L. Amendola, M. Kunz, M. Motta, I. D. Saltas and I. Sawicki, Observables and unobservables
    in dark energy cosmologies
    Phys. Rev. D (2013) [arXiv:1210.0439 [astro-ph.CO]]
  • C. Deffayet, O. Pujolàs, I. Sawicki and A. Vikman, Imperfect Dark Energy from Kinetic Gravity Braiding
    JCAP (2010) [arXiv:1008.0048 [hep-th]]

For a complete list of publications see INSPIRE-HEP.