Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics Physicist (PhD)

About the work

CritPt is a public benchmark of research-level physics challenges, built to test whether frontier AI models can carry out genuine physics research reasoning rather than textbook problem solving. The benchmark paper is arXiv:2509.26574 and we recommend reading it before applying. It will tell you quickly whether this work interests you.

We are engaging physicists to work on research-level physics problems in their own subfield. Depending on where your publication record fits, that can mean creating problems, solving them, reviewing completed work, or auditing it. We agree the specific assignment with you once you are matched to an area.

This is research-grade work rather than volume work. Whatever you produce has to be complete enough for another specialist in your subfield to follow and verify independently, so written reasoning is part of every assignment.

Research areas in this panel

Four areas, three in torsionful gravity and axion inflation and one in high-energy astrophysics. We match narrowly: you need to have published on one of these specific phenomena, not in gravitation broadly. Each area lists the methods it requires.

1. Einstein-Cartan and Nieh-Yan axion inflation: perturbations and power spectrum: Einstein-Cartan-Palatini first-order gravity, Nieh-Yan topological invariant, spacetime torsion in the tetrad formalism, pseudoscalar axion inflation, natural inflation potentials, cosmological perturbation theory, Mukhanov-Sasaki mode equation, primordial curvature power spectrum, slow-roll approximation.

2. Einstein-Cartan and Nieh-Yan axion inflation: FRW background dynamics: First-order Palatini formulation of gravity, tetrad and spin-connection variables, Einstein-Cartan gravity with torsion, Nieh-Yan topological term, axionic natural inflation potential, FRW background cosmological dynamics, numerical integration of background field equations.

3. Dynamical Chern-Simons