News

Rubin in Boston Workshop Spring 2025 – Success!

April 15th, 2025

On April 15th, BU hosted the bi-annual workshop on LSST. 30 Attendees from BU, Harvard, and Northeastern as well as guest speaker Anja von der Linden (LSST DESC Deputy Technical Coordinator).

Professor Martin Schmaltz elected Fellow of the American Physical Society

February 12th, 2025

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.
Martin Schmaltz headshot

Prof Karkare’s Mirror Successfully Installed at the South Pole Telescope

February 12th, 2025

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!

Get to Know: Hongwan Liu

October 19th, 2024 in Get to know:

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.

Colloquium April 23rd: Dragan Huterer

April 23rd, 2024

"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.