For those who would like to work (with me) as a student at ASIAA
See here if you are looking for a postdoc position.Research theme and Supervision policy
In my group, you can work on any theme you are intereted in, as long
as it is related to cosmology. Even though I am not familiar
with the topic you want to work on, I am glad to study and
find a project together. However, it seems that it is not easy for a
student to find a topic by him/herself but rather he/she prefers the advisor
to assign a project. In that case, I will assign a project close to my
research field. I belong to two groups at
ASIAA: Optical-Infrared
(OIR) Subaru
and Theoretical
astrophysics groups. ASIAA is an official member of Subaru
HSC/PFS galaxy survey, and thus all the ASIAA members have full
accesses to these survey data. Thus, the project I provide tends to
be closely related to theoretical or observational aspects of large-scale structure of the universe using these
surveys.
PDF file of the cosmology lecture I gave for undergraduate summer students at ASIAA can be found here
The standard duration for master and PhD studies in my group is 2 and
3 years, respectively. However, as I write below, you are required to
have wide and deep knowledges on physics, math and computer programing
to conduct a research on cosmology, particularly the large-scale
structure of the universe. If your skills are not adequate, it is very
unlikely for you to be able to graduate within the standard period.
Requireed skills and knowledge
Cosmology is not only a part of astronomy but also a part of
theoretical physics. Therefore, deep and wide skills and knowledge on
mathematics and physics are required. For instance, linear algebra,
tensor analysis, calculus and Fourier analysis are used very
frequently. Since gravity is a dominant force on cosmological scales,
Einstein's theory of general relativity (GR) is the main tool to study
cosmology. To join my group, I do not requre you to have a
preknowledge of cosmology, but you should have adequeate experiences
on math and physics, particularly calculations of GR.
Furthermore, since we need to analyze a large volume of our universe, millions of galaxies,
you need to have coding and programming skills.
If you don't like to code and just use public packages of Python for example,
you will have a very tough time of conducting cosmology research.
You will need to be trained with at least one proper language, such as
C / C++ / Fortran / Julia / etc..
Luckily, there are a lot of excellent textbooks to learn about GR and cosmology.
You can see the references shown below.
Apart from textbook-level knowleges, I require my students to check
new papers on astro-ph at arXiv everyday,
or at least on Cosmology and Nongalactic astrophysics categocy, astro-ph.CO.
Recommended textbooks
These are all excellent textbooks that I can recommend to you with confidence.
The books at the upper rows are more introductory and those at the lower rows are more advanced.
I usually recommend to start with "Gravitation and Cosmology" by Weinberg for GR and "Moden Cosmology" by Dodelson and Schmidt for cosmology.
But dependending on your levels, you can pick up more basic or advanced ones.
General Relativity: