Deniz Nazif Tastan

I am a first year Master's student at the University of Bologna. I have graduated from the Department of Physics at the Middle East Technical University as a High Honour student, ranked 3rd among 93 students.

 I started studying physics during my high school education where I attended a summer school on Quantum Mechanics at the Kadir Has University. Having successfully finished it, I was offered an assistantship to Prof. Nihat Berker for the next summer where I also attended an Augmented Mechanics course.  After my admission to METU, I started studying astroparticle physics and got into ODTU IVMER, an astroparticle and radiation physics laboratory led by Prof. Bilge Demirköz. During my time working at IVMER, I studied the effects of heavy, charged particles on materials and worked on a novel method to calculate the voltage/energy coefficients of particle and radiation detectors. After leaving IVMER, I got into a Directed Reading Programme where I studied Quantum Field Theory under the mentorship of Çağdaş Ulus Ağca,  a PhD student. I was then invited to join the research group led by Prof. Bayram Tekin. During my time in the research group, I have taken an informal course on symplectic geometry and geometric quantisation by Asst. Prof. Kadri İlker Berktav from Bilkent University. From which, we have published a lecture note on arXiv which can be seen from the publications section of the website. For my Bachelor's thesis, I worked with Prof. Seçkin Kürkçüoğlu on the Thermofield Double State formalism and the Unruh effect. At the end of the project, I gave a one-month lecture at Bayram Tekin research group on these subjects. As part of the second thesis for my Bachelor's, I worked on a review of string cosmology under the mentorship of Arda Hasar, a Ph.D student at METU.

I am interested in the mathematical and theoretical aspects of cosmology and mainly inflationary models. Currently, my research is on higher derivative corrections to Type IIB supergravity scalar potential  and how they affect the inflationary dynamics. 

Apart from my academic pursuits in physics, I am also interested in photography and entomology.  During my Bachelor's, I have led an entomology research group and a project whose details can be found in the Projects section of the website.