Master thesis in Physics

• Title: Cosmological closure of metric and area-metric ideal fluids
• Author: Nils Leif Fischer
• Submission date: Dec 5, 2017
• Supervisors: Prof. Björn M. Schäfer (Center for Astronomy Heidelberg) and Dr. Frederic P. Schuller (University Erlangen-Nürnberg)
• Abstract: To shed some light on the construction of physically viable gravity theories, I employ the gravitational closure framework to investigate a cosmology that is not a priori based on a metric but assumes an area-metric spacetime geometry that arises from the most general linear theory of electrodynamics. To this end, I develop a symmetry reduction procedure to find, for the first time, an exact non-metric solution of the gravitational closure framework under cosmological symmetries. I investigate cosmological sources of gravity and construct an area-metric description of ideal fluids. I conclude by illustrating that, even though we cannot rely on metric concepts such as a metric line-element or a Levi-Civita connection to begin with, we can recover all required notions, such as light rays and observers, that allow us to conduct cosmological observations.
• Full text: Digital version

Supplementary Mathematica Notebooks

• Derivation of the cosmological metric and area-metric
• Derivation of metric and area-metric ideal fluids
• Solution of the gravitational closure equations for metric and area-metric cosmology

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Using the LaTeX style for your thesis

• Just drop the thesis.cls file into your project folder and begin your document with \documentclass{thesis}. See the msc-thesis.tex file for an example. Then, you can adjust everything in the thesis.cls file to your needs.

• Typeset the document with the XeLaTeX typesetting engine and the Biber bibliography processor (recommended).

• Adjust the following documentclass options to produce appropriate digital and print versions of the document:

  • digital / print primarily toggles link coloring
  • oneside / twoside layouts page headers and footers accordingly
  • openright / openleft / openany adjusts positioning of title page and chapter beginnings in twosided layout

• If necessary for binding, adjust the page offset:

   \geometry{
   	bindingoffset=5mm,
   }

• You may need to change the fonts specified in thesis.cls to ones installed on your system.

• When you include plots in your document, use vector file formats instead of pixel graphics. Have a look at my TexFig repository to see how to generate PGF vector plots with Python's Matplotlib that look great in your LaTeX document.