For those who would like to work (with me) as a student at ASIAA

See here if you are looking for a postdoc position.


I can be an advisor of a graduate student in universities located inside Taiwan for his/her thesis. Since ASIAA is located in a campus at National Taiwan University (NTU), it will be more convenient if the student belongs to physics/astronomy departments at NTU. However, I can accept students from other universities in Taiwan if you do not mind the disadvantage of the distance. If you want me to be your advisor, you are welcomed to visit my office (Astro-Math Building, #1214). However, you are encouraged to make an appointment in advance through email since I am not always in my office. It would be also better if you could send me your grade transcript. You can also contact my students here about the research life.

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:

  1. "Gravity" J. B. Hartle (2002) [ Amazon ] Undergraduate level. Very pedagogical and clear physical description of relativity.
  2. "A First Course in General Relativity" B. Schutz (2009) [ Amazon ] Undergraduate level. Beautiful introduction of geometric view of GR.
  3. "Gravitation and Cosmology" S. Weinberg (1972) John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ Amazon ] Undergraduate - gradualte level. Excellent textbook of general relativity and standard cosmology.

Cosmology:
  1. "The First Three Minutes" S. Weinberg (1993) Basic Books [ Amazon ] For general readers. No equations. Even liberal arts students can read it. Very pedagogical.
  2. "Introduction to Cosmology" B. Ryden (2016) Cambridge University Press [ Amazon ] Undergraduate level. It has comprehensive introduction. No knowledge of general relativity is required.
  3. "Modern Cosmology" S. Dodelson and F. Schmidt (2020) Academic Press [ Amazon ] Gradualte level. Knowledge of general relativity is rquired. You can derive all the equations by yourself.
  4. "Galaxy Formation and Evolution" H. Mo, F. van den Bosch, and S. White (2009) Cambridge University Press [ Amazon ] Graduate - research level. Comprehensive description for galaxy formation and evolution and large-scale structure of the Universe.
  5. "Large-Scale Structure of the Universe" P. J. E. Peebles (1980) Princeton University Press [ Amazon ] Graduate - research level. Knowledge of general relativity and statistics is assumed. All the essential tools for galaxy survey analysis are described.


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