Areas of interest
Early-universe cosmology, inflationary physics, CMB delensing, false vacuum decay, gravitational waves, Bayesian inference, machine learning.
Research activities
2024-present: I have recently become involved in a side project with Hiranya Peiris' QSimFP team, aiming to study false vacuum decay (the foundation of the eternal inflation scenario) in semiclassical lattice simulations
2021-present: PhD project supervised by Anthony Challinor and Blake Sherwin. After developing a primordial B-mode delensing pipeline for the Simons Observatory and obtaining forecasted constraints on inflationary physics, I am now working on building a multitracer CMB lensing template from various cosmological datasets. I will be involved in the analysis of early SO data in the coming months.
2020-present: master's thesis supervised by Inar Timiryasov and Sergey Sibiryakov (EPFL), aiming to develop a model-independent, neural network-based algorithm to detect deviations from General Relativity in gravitational wave signals. In the thesis (submitted in 2021), we demonstrated the technique on a simplified toy model; we are now seeking to generalize it to fully realistic GW templates.
2019-2020: semester project supervised by Frederic Courbin (EPFL) on time-delay cosmography with lensed quasars.
2018-2019: Honours thesis supervised by Gary Hinshaw (UBC Vancouver) on the calibration of the CHIME radiotelescope.
Education
2021-present: PhD student in Astronomy, Gates Cambridge scholar.
2019-2021: MSc in Physics, EPFL (Switzerland). Winner of the 2021 IBM Research Award and the Lausanne Zonta Club special merit award.
2016-2019: BSc in Physics, EPFL (Switzerland). Recipient of a scholarship for an exchange year at UBC Vancouver (Canada).
Publications
E. Hertig et al., "The Simons Observatory: Combining cross-spectral foreground cleaning with multi-tracer B-mode delensing for improved constraints on inflation", arXiv:2405.01621 (2024), accepted by Physical Review D.
E. Hertig et al., "The Simons Observatory: Combining delensing and foreground cleaning for improved constraints on inflation", Proceedings of the 58th Rencontres de Moriond (Cosmology), arXiv:2405.13201 (2024).
K. Wolz et al., "The Simons Observatory: component separation pipelines for B-modes", Proceedings of the 58th Rencontres de Moriond (Cosmology), arXiv:2407.06891 (2024).
Outreach
- STEM Ambassador
- International Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT) juror and former team leader for Switzerland
- Wednesday Open Evening talk
- 2023 STEM SMART mentor
Hobbies
- Figure skating (competitive)
- Playing the piano
- Skiing
- Hiking in nature
