Within the Chair for Cosmology and Structure Formation at LMU, we are pursuing studies in cosmology and the formation and evolution of large scale structures in the Universe. Our work is at the interface of observation and theory, where we seek to bring together new observational constraints with state of the art hydrodynamical simulations of structure formation. In our recent papers we have presented forefront results in topics such as the nature of the cosmic acceleration, the sum of the neutrino masses, halo mass constraints from weak lensing studies of clusters, and the cosmic history of AGN feedback and its effects on the large scale structure. Most of our ongoing structure formation studies focus on clusters of galaxies, the most massive collapsed structures in the universe.
Our recent analyses have focused on galaxy cluster populations identified through the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect by the South Pole Telescope (SPT), optically selected clusters identified within the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and X-ray selected clusters identified through the ROSAT All Sky Survey. With the successful launch of eROSITA in summer 2019, our focus will now turn to the eROSITA cluster and group sample. We are also actively preparing for the ESA Euclid mission and for the LSST ground based survey, and we are participating in the scientific exploitation of radio data from the SKA precursor array MeerKAT.
In this IMPRS round, we will be searching for students to take a leading role in the following areas:
- Studies of the formation and evolution of galaxies and of the feedback history of radio AGN within and around X-ray, optically and SZE selected galaxy clusters using radio data from MeerKAT and SUMSS together with optical data from DES
- Studies of the growth rate of cosmic structures and of the cosmic acceleration using the evolution of galaxy cluster populations selected within the SPT-3G survey and eROSITA
- Studies of the internal structure of eROSITA selected galaxy clusters and groups using X-ray constraints on the intracluster medium from eROSITA, optical constraints on the galaxy populations from DES and weak lensing mass profiles derived from the DES shear and photo-z catalogs. The student leading this PhD project will be jointly supervised by Prof. Mohr (LMU/MPE) and Dr. Jeremy Sanders (MPE).