News
Quanta Magazine Video Feat. Professor Brout – Biggest Breakthroughs in Physics (2024)
BU Cosmology Faculty Dillon Brout's work was highlighted in this year's Quanta Magazine roundup of the Biggest Breakthroughs in Physics (2024)
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhG56kltfP4
Professor Martin Schmaltz elected Fellows of the American Physical Society
Congratulations to BU Cosmology Group Professor Martin Schmaltz, 2024 recipient of the Division of Particles and Fields Fellowship for contributions to theories for particle physics beyond the standard model, and their implications for cosmology, flavor physics, and electroweak symmetry breaking.
Prof Karkare’s Mirror Successfully Installed at the South Pole Telescope
Assistant professor Kirit Karkare is co-PI of the South Pole Telescope Summertime Line Intensity Mapper (SPT-SLIM), an experiment at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station that uses new superconducting detector technology to detect galaxies from early in the universe’s history. BU was responsible for fabricating the mirror that directs light collected by the SPT primary mirror to the detectors. The Scientific Instrument Facility (SIF), including Heitor Mourato, Glenn Thayer, and Jose Velho, machined the mirror in time for deployment to the South Pole in December 2024. Pictured are SPT winterover Dr. Simeon Bash after installation, and the 10-m SPT primary mirror. SPT-SLIM is now taking data and the BU team is excited to analyze it!
Congratulations to Professor Brout – Top Cited Paper
Congratulations to Professor Brout for being recognized as having authored one of the top cited papers in all of astronomy and astrophysics in the last 4 years!
This paper has helped us better understand the nature of dark energy, dark matter, and the expansion of the universe.
Award:
https://ioppublishing.org/north-america-top-cited-paper-award/
Get to Know: Hongwan Liu
Hi! I’m an assistant professor of physics at Boston University, and a member of the BU Cosmology Group.
My research lies at the intersection of cosmology, astroparticle physics and high-energy physics. I work to uncover what lies beyond our currently incomplete understanding of physics.
I enjoy thinking about how physics at the smallest scales, where new, microscopic particles may interact with each other through yet undiscovered forces, can be discovered using the physics at the largest scales, which determine the structure and evolution of our Universe. My work combines aspects of both theoretical and computational physics, all applied to finding ways of uncovering new physics in current and future experimental data.
Prior to joining BU in 2024, I spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago, and at Fermilab, where I was the Schramm fellow for theoretical astrophysics. From 2019 – 2023, I was jointly appointed as a postdoctoral associate at New York University’s Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics (CCPP), and at Princeton University. I received my PhD in physics from MIT in 2019, and my BA in physics and mathematics from Cornell University before that.
Visitior: Tanvi Karwal
Colloquium April 23rd: Dragan Huterer
"Cosmological results from the DESI Year-1 baryon acoustic oscillations measurements" (U. Michigan)
The standard model of cosmology contains two mysterious components, dark matter and dark energy, that dominate the dynamics of the universe yet whose physical origin is not well understood. I will briefly review the history and status of dark energy, the component that causes the accelerated expansion of the universe. I will also explain the physics behind how dark energy is constrained with cosmological observations. Then I will present and discuss cosmological results from the measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations in the first year of observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI Y1), which were announced on April 4, 2024. These Y1 and future (Y2-Y5) DESI results will provide an important contribution to the overall constraints on dark energy, neutrino mass, and primordial non-Gaussianity.
Professor Brout In the News (Evolving Dark Energy w/ DES, Pantheon+, and DESI)
Professor Brout recently appeared in:
Science Friday,
Quanta Magazine,
Science News,
and
NPR All Things Considered
HET Seminar Feb 28th: Martin Millon
Martin Millon: Cosmology with Strong Lensing: measuring the Hubble Constant with Gravitationally Lensed Quasars
HET Seminar Dec 8th: Rashmish Mishra
Rashmish Mishra: Holographic Phase Transitions in the early Universe
Strongly coupled confining theories are well-motivated in many BSM frameworks. The early universe cosmological history of these theories provides possibilities for observable signals. These theories undergo confinement deconfinement phase transition in the early universe, which can result in gravitational wave signals, observable in upcoming experiments. Using AdS/CFT, these theories have been studied in the Randall-Sundrum framework, and various quantitative aspects of the phase transition have been calculated. In the models that have been considered, the rate of transition from the hot phase to the confined phase is very small and leads to a period of supercooling. This enhances the gravitational wave signal, but presents a tension between a low confinement scale and fitting to the standard picture of BBN. In this talk, I will revisit these features and argue that some of the issues are specific to the simplified models that have been studied. I will present two modifications that are expected on general grounds and argue that both of them enhance the rate. I will also present the effect on the resulting phenomenology. The talk will be based on 2309.10090 and an ongoing work.