WILL CERNE
Researcher - Theoretical Cosmology - Inflation
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About Me
Welcome to my page. I am Will Cerne, an M2 student in theoretical cosmology at the Institute of Science Tokyo. I am a part of the Suyama Research Lab. My current research focuses on inflation, although in the future I would like to work on many areas of cosmology.
I was raised in Wisconsin, USA. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with Moritz Muenchmeyer as my research advisor. In March of 2024, I moved to Japan to pursue my doctorate at the Institute of Science Tokyo (formerly Tokyo Institute of Technology).
My hobbies outside of physics include learning Japanese and competitive Rubik's Cube solving. I am in the top 50 fastest solvers in the Rubik's Cube Blindfolded category, with a peak world ranking of 19th.
If you are interested in talking with me about my research, please contact me at cerne.w.57e6@m.isct.ac.jp
Research Interests
My research focuses on cosmic inflation, a period at the very beginning of the Universe directly after the Big Bang.
My current work is on calculating the effective action of the inflaton field. By separating the scalar field into a mean field averaged out over 3-space, and a fluctuation field about this mean field, one can compute the "effective action", a one-particle irreducible path integration with the classical action, integrated over the fluctuation field. When varied, this effective action gives the EOM of the quantum expectation value of the mean field, including its self interaction with the fluctuation field.
This formalism derives new terms that are second order in slow-roll inflation. I am currently studying the properties of these new terms. The current work considers a background spacetime without any perturbations from the inflaton field (thus precisely speaking the research has been done with a test field on a quasi de-Sitter background), but understanding how these new terms affect the motion of the inflaton field could result in understanding how new corrections to observables generated during inflation, such as the scalar metric perturbations and the curvature perturbation power spectrum, may behave.
Published Works
coming soon :)
Presentations
March 2025: JGRC 2025 - Poster Presentation - The Inflaton Effective Action: Novel Terms
I did a poster presentation at JGRC 2025 about my ongoing research in the inflaton effective action (hyperlink to paper once it's published).
Education
September 2020 - December 2023: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Bachelor's of Science in Mathematics, Bachelor's of Science in Physics, Certificate of Professional Japanese Communication
April 2024 - present: Institute of Science Tokyo
Master of Science in Physics
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