Lachlan Dufort-Kennett
Welcome to my website. I recently graduated with an MPhys (Hons) in Theoretical Physics from the University of St Andrews. I'm currently looking to start a PhD in Cosmology.
Outside of physics and astronomy, I enjoy coding, playing music, swimming, and being outdoors (mainly hiking and cycling). I've put some stuff I've created on this site below, and more may appear in the future!
Research
Here are some research projects in theoretical physics and astrophysics that I worked on during my time at the University of St Andrews.
The Evolution of Large Scale Galaxy Bias
The research project for my master's thesis, supervised by Dr Rita Tojeiro. Looked at fitting a model of the time-evolution of galaxy bias to galaxies in the MillenniumTNG simulation. This model was an extension of previous models where galaxy number was fixed to where it was allowed to change over time. The GitHub repository for the project can be found here.
Scatter in the Stellar Mass/Halo Mass Relation in IllustrisTNG
Research internship undertaken during the summer of 2023, supervised by Dr Rita Tojeiro. The stellar mass of galaxies and the total mass of their dark matter halos are correlated, however there is a large scatter in the relation for which the physical cause is not fully understood. In this project I investigated different causes of the scatter in the IllustrisTNG simulation. The GitHub repository for the project can be found here.
Modelling Bose-Einstein Condensation with Complex Organic Molecules
My first research internship, completed in the summer of 2022 under the supervision of Prof Jonathan Keeling. I tested the feasibility of a numerical method for modelling high-frequency vibrational modes of organic molecules that are strongly coupled to light in an optical cavity. These collective excitations are known as exciton-polaritons and can form a Bose-Einstein Condensate. The Python scripts I created to test this method were created in my fork of the OQuPy package on GitHub which can be found here.
Fun Projects
Here is a small selection of my personal projects that I've started and inevitably left unfinished.
Lecture Notes
I've written up some of my lecture notes from uni into nicely-formatted PDFs with HTML versions coming soon. You can check them out here!
