News: 2021

Meet the KICP Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Anastasia Sokolenko.
She will be joining us in the fall from HEPHY (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Vienna. She received her PhD at the University of Oslo where she studied Theoretical Physics.
Welcome to KICP, Anastasia!

Meet the Inaugural Brinson Prize Fellow, Ani Chiti.
He will be joining us in the fall from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied observational astrophysics.
Welcome to KICP, Ani!

My research interests include a number of topics in cosmology. I have been involved in The Dark Energy Survey collaboration. I used DES data to develop my PhD. thesis work. I have been computing angular two point auto and cross correlation functions. Also, I have been developing with my collaborators methods to extract the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) scale relying on observable quantities only. I am interested in large-scale structure of the Universe, in galaxy-galaxy clustering and General Relativity. Moreover, I have a great interest in high energy physics, theoretical and experimental.

Jeff McMahon and his team have developed new techniques for working with curved lenses instead of flat silicon wafers for CMB telescope lenses.

For Dan Hooper, head of theoretical astrophysics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Chicago, solving these questions involves radically rethinking what we think we know about the universe’s very early history.
Interviewed by Richard Webb, Executive Editor, New Scientist at the Royal Institution, London in Feb 2020.

Citation: "Joshua Frieman (Fermilab / University of Chicago): For significant theoretical work on inflationary cosmology and dark energy and for pioneering contributions to optical survey science."

PUEO is a balloon mission designed to launch from Antarctica that will detect signals from ultra-high energy neutrinos, particles that contain valuable clues about the highest energy astrophysical processes, including the creation of black holes and neutron star mergers. Neutrinos travel across the universe undisturbed, carrying information about events billions of light years away. PUEO would be the most sensitive survey of cosmic ultra-high energy neutrinos ever conducted. The principal investigator is Abigail Vieregg of the University of Chicago.

His work involves exploiting superheated liquid techniques in sensitive bubble chambers for direct dark matter detection experiments.

He studies cosmology, where he analyzes the faint microwave signal coming from the beginning of our universe to help answer questions in fundamental physics.

As a sixth year PhD candidate in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Gourav studies the formation and evolution of galaxies in distant galaxy clusters, using data from ground- and space-based telescopes.

UChicago scientist lays out how LIGO gravitational waves could be scrambled, yielding information.
“Gravitational waves are the perfect messenger to see these possible modifications of gravity, if they exist.”—Astrophysicist Jose María Ezquiaga