PhD Applications
PhD Applications
We welcome applications to join the Particle Cosmology Group as a postgraduate student and carry out research for a PhD degree. Details of the Groups' interests can be found in our research and people pages.
All PhD applications must be made centrally, through the Researcher Academy. The deadline for PhD applications is 26th January 2026. You can find further details on how to apply here. Please state your interest in the Particle Cosmology group on your application. Once you have submitted your application, please also send a brief email containing your application ID to the particle cosmology admissions coordinator, David Stefanyszyn.
Potential supervisors for a PhD are listed on the academic staff page for the Particle Cosmology group. Below are some examples of potential PhD projects to begin in September/October 2026. However, other projects will also be available and can be discussed with applicants. If the projects listed below do not align with your research interests, we still encourage you to apply and ask you to clearly state in your application what your interests are.
The nature of dark matter is one of the major open questions in astrophysics and particle physics. There are several well-motivated candidates (e.g. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, Primordial Black Holes and axions), and numerous observational and experimental searches are underway.
My research centres around two key questions:
- How can we reliably probe the properties of dark matter using observations and experiments?
- How does the dark matter distribution within galaxies depend on its nature?
For further details, see https://anne-green.net/physics/research/research.html.
Various potential PhD projects are available in this area, and the specific project will depend on the student's skills and interests. Projects typically involve a mixture of analytic and numerical calculations, and close contact with observations/experiments. This PhD studentship is led by Professor Anne Green.
Computing observables in accelerating spacetimes
Cosmological correlators are the fundamental observables of early universe cosmology and are computed within the framework of quantum field theory. While their tree level (classical) structures are now reasonably well understood, loop (quantum) corrections are not. This project will develop techniques to compute loop contributions to cosmological observables with particular focus on a regularisation scheme known as eta-regularisation. In addition to computing correlation functions, this project will also focus on computing scattering amplitudes in de Sitter space. Such amplitudes have only recently been defined and very little is understood about their structures. This project will focus on how symmetries, locality, causality and unitarity manifest themselves in de Sitter S-matrices. This project is lead by Professor
Antonio Padilla and Dr
David Stefanyszyn and the student should hold interests in quantum field theory, gravity and cosmology.
Dark energy in fundamental theory
Cosmological observations indicate that the universe is going through a phase of accelerated expansion, driven by a substance dubbed dark energy, whose microscopic energy remains unknown. Deriving a consistent theory of dark energy from fundamental theory, specifically string theory, is an ongoing challenge. This project will seek to develop various ways to achieve that and to better understand the obstacles. Further, it is well known that the scale of dark energy is very low compared to other scales in fundamental physics. This leads to problems of naturalness, and in particular the cosmological constant. This project will also seek to develop a better understanding of, and solutions to, the cosmological constant problem. This PhD studentship is led by Professor
Antonio Padilla.
Cosmic bubble growth in quantum field theory
In the early Universe there is the possibility of phase transitions, with bubbles nucleating and expanding to complete the transition. In the context of gravitational waves, one of the important quantities that determines the strength of the signal is the bubble wall speed, which is affected by interactions with the particles that the bubble sweeps up. In this project we will use techniques from numerical quantum field theory to simulate the bubble's expansion, and so give a direct computation of the wall speed. This PhD studentship is led by Professor
Paul Saffin and Dr
Oliver Gould.
Further information on the admissions procedure can be found here. All applications should be made online here where the prospectus can also be found. Once you have submitted your application, please also send a brief email containing your application ID to the particle cosmology admissions coordinator, David Stefanyszyn.