Nico Hamaus

Ph.D.


Welcome to my website

portrait

I'm a researcher in the Cosmology group at the University Observatory Munich (USM) of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU). My current research focuses on the large-scale structure of the Universe and its relation to cosmology and the fundamental laws of physics. For more details, please check out the 'Research' section of this website.


I was born and grew up in Starnberg, a small town south of Munich in Germany. I studied physics and astronomy at the LMU and finished my diploma thesis (M.Sc.) at the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching. For a dissertation I moved to Switzerland to work with my Ph.D. advisor Uroš Seljak at the University of Zurich (UZH) and partly at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) and the Berkeley National Lab (LBNL). After that I held a position as post-doctoral research fellow jointly at the physics department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the US and the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (IAP), which belongs to the CNRS and the University Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC) in Paris, France.


The background image shows a slice through a large N-body simulation of the distribution of cold dark matter in the Universe. One can perceive the intricate structure of the cosmic web, which is composed of clusters, filaments, sheets and, predominantly, voids. For more details on the void research projects I am involved in, check out cosmicvoids.net and VIDE. Below are a few links to non-technical articles and interviews about some of my work:


Scientific American, detektor.fm, Quanta Magazine, Spektrum.de, Slate Magazine, Star Spot Podcast, Deutschlandfunk, Weser Kurier, APS Physics Synopsis, LMU, SPACE, Astronomy Now, Inside Science, APS Physics Focus