June 14, 2012

Pyinspire - Python script to access INSPIRE database

The new INSPIRE HEP database has been up and running for a while now, and is going from strength to strength (despite some recent wobbles concerning citation counts). I recently needed to get the BibTeX entries for a few papers and instead of copy-pasting from the results web page each time I wondered whether a more programmatic solution existed. There used to be a few utilities for SPIRES which enabled you to get results using a script but I haven’t seen any that do this with INSPIRE (although there is a plugin for Jabref).

April 3, 2012

Trispectrum during Inflation

After a lot of work, “Large trispectrum in two-field slow-roll inflation” was released on the arXiv yesterday as arXiv:1203.6844. In this article Joe Elliston, Laila Alabidi, David Mulryne, Reza Tavakol and I look at the generation of higher order statistics during inflation in the early universe. In the early universe the curvature perturbations, which later are seen as temperature fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), are initially thought to be Gaussian, but can become skewed during inflation depending on the physics of their evolution.

March 8, 2012

Paper published in Physical Review D

My latest paper “Calculating nonadiabatic pressure perturbations during multifield inflation”, written with Adam Christopherson, has now been published in Physical Review D as Phys. Rev. D 85, 063507. The DOI is 10.1103/PhysRevD.85.063507 and if you want to get the (freely available) arXiv version the number is arXiv:1111.6919. This paper investigates the isocurvature or nonadiabatic perturbations during inflationary expansion with more than one field. We performed numerical simulations using Pyflation version 0.

December 5, 2011

Two new papers on the arXiv

Last Tuesday was a bit hectic for me as I tried to coordinate the last minute changes needed to put two papers on the arXiv servers for the next day. The two articles which are now available are numbered 1111.6919 and 1111.6940: Calculating Non-adiabatic Pressure Perturbations during Multi-field Inflation Ian Huston, Adam J. Christopherson Abstract: Isocurvature perturbations naturally occur in models of inflation consisting of more than one scalar field.

July 21, 2011

Outreach lecture to teachers

I gave a lecture to secondary school teachers this week as part of the Goldsmith’s Company’s Science for Society Course on astrophysics. Having heard about the Big Bang model and some of its problems from my colleague Dr David Mulryne, I was given the task of outlining how the inflationary paradigm tries to solve these problems and some of the reasons we think it is a good model of the early universe.

March 18, 2011

Big Bang Fair 2011

As part of my outreach activities this year I participated in the speed networking sessions of the Big Bang Fair held last week in East London’s ExCeL centre. I had a great time at the previous London based Big Bang Fair in 2009 and since then the event has only got bigger, louder and more impressive. The ExCeL centre is a great venue for these large scale fairs, even if someone forgot to turn off the smoke alarms during the BBC’s Bang Goes the Theory stage show.

March 7, 2011

New paper and Pyflation software package

My latest paper has just hit the arXiv and is now available. The paper builds on the numerical work I previously completed on cosmological perturbations beyond linear order. The new results do not assume slow-roll in the calculation of the source term for the second order equations of motion and so allow a much greater range of potentials to be analysed. The paper is called “Second Order Perturbations During Inflation Beyond Slow-roll” and already has a record on SPIRES and Inspire Beta.

March 4, 2011

Checklist for arXiv submission

I am currently finishing up a paper that is about to be submitted to the arXiv and I thought I would go through the list of things I normally do just before sending the work off. It’s mainly a common sense list but in the rush to get something out it is good to have a list to work from to make sure you don’t miss anything (misspelling collaborators names is not helpful!).

Check bib style is correct. If the journal you are planning to submit to has a particular house style for the bibliography it is probably worth using it in the arXiv submission.
Check bibliography text is correct. Even though I think BiBTeX is the great, and much easier than preparing the bibliography by hand (which some people still do), there can be instances when a stray space or mistakenly capitalised letter appear. If you get your BiBTeX entries from SPIRES or Inspire this is mostly taken care of, but there is always the odd paper or book entry that you have typed in by hand. Check the final output in the paper, not just the .bib file contents.

February 28, 2011

Minor Tick Labels in Matplotlib

This is a slightly more technical post than usual but having figured out how to do something quite esoteric in Matplotlib I thought I would write it down to save me remembering. I have been making quite a few plots recently for a paper which should hit the arXiv very soon. The Python plotting package Matplotlib has been indispensable in this regard, especially as I took the effort of creating a script which creates all the plots.

February 17, 2011

Adam Christopherson awarded prestigious RAS fellowship!

Many congratulations to Adam Christopherson who has been awarded the prestigious Sir Norman Lockyer Fellowship of the Royal Astronomical Society. The three year fellowship is awarded “to enable an outstanding research worker to conduct a self-directed programme of research in any astronomical topic”. Adam joined Queen Mary as a PhD student a year after I did and it’s been great sharing an office with him over the past few years. Although we haven’t yet written a paper together we’ve thrown a lot of ideas around so hopefully we can work together on something soon.