Internship and thesis proposals
Probing the nature of dark matter with globular clusters via cosmological simulations and orbital integration methods

Domaines
Statistical physics
Relativity/Astrophysics/Cosmology
Hydrodynamics/Turbulence/Fluid mechanics

Type of internship
Théorique, numérique
Description
The relics of galaxy formation and assembly are now observed in halos across the local Universe, yet a comprehensive picture of the Milky Way (MW) formation history is still missing. Globular clusters (GCs), gravitationally bound stellar systems orbiting massive galaxies, represent powerful tracers of this hierarchical assembly process. We have recently developed a novel framework that combines cosmological simulations with orbital integration techniques to investigate theassembly of GC populations in the MW (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13254). The objective of this internship is to improve the formation component of our GC model by incorporating high-redshift constraints from JWST (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10974) together with present-day constraints from Gaia (https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09568). The goal is to increase the physical realism of the model by enabling GC tagging across all redshifts, using a formation efficiency parameter derived from local gas andstellarproperties resolved in cosmological simulations. A further motivation for building robust GC models lies in their potential as probes of dark matter, by exploring their dynamics under alternative dark matter scenarios(https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00927). Depending on the progress of the project, this aspect may also be explored during the internship.

Contact
Pierre Boldrini
Laboratory : LIRA, Observatoire de Paris - UMR8254
Team : Pôle Etoiles-Galaxies
Team Website
/ Thesis :    Funding :