News: 2022

Scientists have new evidence about how cosmic cataclysms forge gold, platinum and other heavy members of the periodic table

I am an experimental cosmologist building technology to probe the structure and origins of the universe.

Edgar Marrufo Villalpando, graduate student, won the 2022 DOE Graduate Instrumentation Research Award (GIRA).

I am a postdoctoral researcher working with Prof. Chihway Chang and Prof. Josh Frieman. I am heavily involved in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration, studying large scale structure using weak gravitational lensing. In particular, during my PhD I have been focusing in calibrating the redshift distributions of both the background and foreground galaxy samples used for the weak lensing analysis of the first three years of DES data.

I am interested in astroparticle physics, plasma physics, and multi-messenger astronomy. I study compact sources and transient events, such as neutron stars, or tidal disruption events.

My research lies at the intersection of cosmology and general relativity, most of the time involving simulations. Usually, our cosmological simulations of large-scale structure formation make assumptions about the nature of gravity and space-time. These simulations are extremely important to our understanding of the Universe in regimes we cannot access analytically.

Prof. Abigail Vieregg and her students build instruments to detect the highest energy neutrinos.

Abigail Vieregg received a Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative Award for instrumentation development to advance the detection of the highest energy neutrinos.

Dr. Marcela Carena of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory – Honored “for leadership and influential contributions to particle physics, including novel theoretical ideas and strategies for HEP experiments related to the Higgs boson, dark matter and electroweak baryogenesis, and promoting Latin American participation in DOE-hosted experiments.”

I work broadly within the realm of gravitational-wave astronomy. Nearly infinitesimal ripples in the fabric of spacetime, gravitational waves are generated by the most cataclysmic events in the Universe, including the explosions of stars and the relativistic collisions of black holes.

I work on the detection of ultra-high energy neutrinos by measuring the radio signals that are emitted when they interact in glacial ice in Greenland or Antarctica.

Ph.D., Astrophysics, University of Toronto, 2021

Research: Circumgalactic Medium and Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium; Quasar Absorption Lines; X-ray and Sunyaev–Zeldovich Effect.

I work on field theoretic aspects of de Sitter (dS) space, and its relation to the physics of inflation.

In their new paper, Holz and first author Jose María Ezquiaga suggest that they can use our newfound knowledge about the whole population of black holes as a calibration tool.