Licia Verde

Licia Verde

Universitat de Barcelona

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

Originally from Venice (Italy) Licia Verde studied physics as an undergraduate at the Università degli Studi di Padova. She obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh (UK) sponsored by a Marie Curie grant from the EU, and then moved to a research assistant position at Princeton University and at Rutgers University (USA). At Princeton she held a Chandra postdoctoral fellowship and a Spitzer postdoctoral fellowship and she entered the WMAP science team. She spent 4 years as faculty at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). In September 2007, she moved to Barcelona as an ICREA Research Professor. Verde has received the 2012 Gruber prize in Cosmology, the Narcis Monturiol medal 2017,  the 2018 Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics,  the  premi Nacional de Recerca 2018, the European Astroniomical Society Lodewijk Woltjier Lecture 2019, and  the Premi Rei Jaume I  for fundamental science in 2021.

Research interests

I am interested in Cosmology, which is the study of the origin, evolution and composition of the universe. Cosmology has a very successful standard model, which, however, is unsatisfactory and surely is incomplete. According to the model, most of the matter in the Universe is dark, exotic and only inferred indirectly; also more than 70% of what makes up the universe is something that suggests that some energy is associated with the nothingness of vacuum: "dark energy". Dark energy is one of the major problems in physics today and is motivating a host of future and planned observations. I study the "large-scale distribution of galaxies", their statistical properties and how the emerge and evolve from the Universe's initial conditions, which can be gleaned from  the statistical properties of the heat left over from the big bang. These observations are used to shed light on the Universe composition (including the dark energy) evolution and ultimately the physics governing it.

Selected publications

- Jung G, Ravenni A, Baldi M, Coulton WR, Jamieson D, Karagiannis D, Liguori M, Shao H, Verde L, Villaescusa-Navarro F & Wandelt BD 2023, 'Quijote-PNG: The Information Content of the Halo Mass Function', Astrophysical journal, 957 - 1.

- Mukhanov V & Verde L 2023, 'JCAP 20th anniversary special issue: editorial', Journal Of Cosmology And Astroparticle Physics, 11, 018.

- Mukhanov V & Verde L 2023, 'JCAP 20th anniversary retrospective: editorial', Journal Of Cosmology And Astroparticle Physics, 6, 041.

- Jung G, Karagiannis D, Liguori M, et al. 2023, 'Quijote-PNG: Quasi-maximum Likelihood Estimation of Primordial Non-Gaussianity in the Nonlinear Halo Density Field', Astrophysical Journal, 948, 2, 135.

- Brieden S, Gil-Marin H & Verde L 2023, 'A tale of two (or more) h's', Journal Of Cosmology And Astroparticle Physics, 2023, 4, 023.

- Coulton WR, Villaescusa-Navarro F, Jamieson D, et al. 2023, 'Quijote-PNG: The Information Content of the Halo Power Spectrum and Bispectrum', Astrophysical Journal, 943, 2, 178.

- Coulton WR, Villaescusa-Navarro F, Jamieson D, et al. 2023, 'Quijote-PNG: Simulations of Primordial Non-Gaussianity and the Information Content of the Matter Field Power Spectrum and Bispectrum', Astrophysical Journal, 943, 1, 64.

Selected research activities

Scientific Director of Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle physics (JCAP)
arXiv science advisory board (Chair)