Lee Pryor to present M.S. defense public talk on October 23
Lee Pryor will give the public talk for his M.S. defense on Friday, October 23, 2026, at 3 p.m. in Olin 101.
His talk is titled “Comparing an f(R,T) alternate gravity theory with type Ia supernovae and exploring a limiting case.”
Abstract
This thesis relates the theoretical background necessary for the development of simple f (R, T ) theories of gravity and investigates the validity of one such specific theory at late cosmological times by comparing model data to the Pantheon dataset of type Ia supernoavae (SNe Ia). The specific model put forth here replaces the standard gravity Lagrangian of R + 2Λ with R + λTϵ where T is the trace of the stress-energy tensor. This is a reasonable model to explore due to the fact that the T term is negligible at early times for values of ϵ < 1, thus predicting an early universe similar to that of the standard theory. At late times, this term becomes dominant and produces a viable alternative to the widely accepted cosmological constant as a driving mechanism for accelerated expansion.
About the speaker
Pryor recently started work at Yale University as a member of the instructional lab management team in the physics department. He spends much of his time operating a Van de Graaf accelerator and working on physics demonstrations.
