Hi, I’m Andrei, a postdoc working in observational cosmology at the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at The Ohio State University.

About me

My research focuses on using the Lyman-\(\alpha\) forest to study the expansion of the Universe, and the properties of its constituents. The Lyman-\(\alpha\) forest probes the large-scale structure of the Universe through the distribution of neutral hydrogen. I’m a member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, which is currently performing a five year spectroscopic survey of large-scale structure. It will measure the distance (redshift) to about 40 million objects, which is about 10 times more compared to previous surveys. DESI uses a few different tracers of large-scale structure, with the Lyman-\(\alpha\) forest probing the most distant parts of the Universe, at a time when the dark energy fraction was very small, and the Universe was still matter dominated.

Highlights of my past work include the tightest Hubble constant measurement from large-scale structure at high redshift (\(z>1\); Cuceu et al. 2022), the first approximation-independent upper limit from cosmology on the mass of the lightest neutrino (Loureiro, Cuceu, et al. 2019), and the first study on how to use the three-dimensional distribution of the Lyman-\(\alpha\) forest to measure the growth rate of cosmic structure (Cuceu et al. 2021).

I currently work on using Lyman-\(\alpha\) forest data from DESI to measure Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, the Alcock-Paczynski effect and the growth rate of cosmic structure. These measurements will result in new state-of-the-art constraints on the expansion history of the high redshift Universe.

Main research interests

• Lyman-\(\alpha\) forest
• Large-scale structure of the Universe
• Nature of dark energy, and gravity on large scales
• Statistical methods, data analysis, inference, Bayesian techniques

Education

PhD in Astrophysics: University College London (2018-2022)

Doctoral thesis: Precision cosmology from the clustering of large-scale structures, UCL (Apr 2022)
Advisors: Andreu Font-Ribera, Benjamin Joachimi

MSci in Astrophysics: University College London (2014-2018)

First Class Honours (Integrated Bachelor’s and Master’s)
Master thesis title: Reversing gravitational collapse
Advisor: Andrew Pontzen

Selected Publications

• A. Cuceu, A. Font-Ribera, S. Nadathur, et al., arXiv e-prints: 2209.13942 (Sept. 2022).

• A. Cuceu, A. Font-Ribera, P. Martini, et al., arXiv e-prints: 2209.12931 (Sept. 2022).

• F. Gerardi, A. Cuceu, A. Font-Ribera, et al., arXiv e-prints: 2209.11263 (Sept. 2022).

• A. Cuceu, A. Font-Ribera, B. Joachimi, S. Nadathur, Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc. 506, 5439–5450, arXiv: 2103.14075 (Oct. 2021)

• A. Cuceu, A. Font-Ribera, B. Joachimi, JCAP 2020, 035, arXiv: 2004.02761 (July 2020)

• A. Cuceu, J. Farr, P. Lemos, A. Font-Ribera, JCAP 2019, 044, arXiv: 1906.11628 (Oct. 2019).

• A. Loureiro, A. Cuceu, et al., Phys. Rev. Letters. 123, 081301, arXiv: 1811.02578 (Aug. 2019).

See Nasa ADS for all publications.