Valeria Pettorino

University of Heidelberg

Dark energy cosmologies and predictions for future experiments

2009-2010: Fall

Valeria Pettorino got her Ph.D. in physics in 2005 at the University Federico II in Napoli, Italy, and in collaboration with SISSA, Trieste, Italy. In 2005-2006, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Torino (Italy); she then moved to SISSA in 2007 within the D4 Project. She was named Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Heidelberg, Germany , where she worked from July 2007 until July 2009.
She works on several aspects concerning cosmology, the study of the content and evolution of the Universe. In particular, her areas of expertise concern dark energy, a component contributing to about 74% of the content of the Universe and providing cosmological acceleration. She investigates this issue from a theoretical point of view, within coupled quintessence theories as well as scalar tensor theories. Furthermore, she investigates effects on observations both within linear perturbations, on cosmic microwave background and at the non linear level, within structure formation, also via N-body simulations. She has recently joined the PLANCK and EUCLID collaborations.