Master thesis in Physics

My thesis on Cosmological closure of metric and area-metric ideal fluids I wrote in 2017 at Heidelberg University.


From README.md in the nilsvu/msc-thesis GitHub repository:

Master thesis in Physics

DOI

  • 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


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.