Research
Here you will find information about research at GoLP and related issues.
Current research areas
Theoretical Astrophysics and Cosmology
Contact researcher: Orfeu Bertolami, Tiago Barreiro, Carla Carvalho e Pedro SilvaThe recent discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe has led to the development of research programmes to fit this new observation into the general scheme of the Big-Bang cosmological model. These attempts include models of dark energy and models where gravity is modified due to corrections arising from braneworld theories.
An active line of research in IST consists in the study and the testing of the unified model of dark energy and dark matter, the generalized Chaplygin gas model. Theoretical work has been carried out to understand the origin of this unification and to device new observational strategies. These include the use of gravitational lensing techniques, cosmic microwave background radiation properties, supernovae data, correlations extracted from the observation of gamma-ray bursts and some features of the process of structure formation. Despite the progress, some key questions remain still open, specially in what concerns the issue of gravitational collapse.
Another area of recent interest in the group is the development of braneworld models to understand gravity in four dimensions, and hence the problem of the accelerated expansion of the universe. In this respect, we are also interested in brane models that can bring some insight on the nature of fundamental symmetries such as Lorentz invariance.
