CosmoPhys

New Location – This post is no longer maintained here and has been expanded and moved to this new location.

This is a simple list referencing examples of the work that I find interesting by some current early career physicists (primarily in cosmology and astroparticle physics). I may expand it later with more comments, but here it is for now:

Cosmologist Sunny Vagnozzi reviews 3 papers per week on cosmology and astroparticle physics on his blog. His PhD thesis, Cosmological searches for the neutrino mass scale and mass ordering, was selected for a Springer Thesis Award as one of the best PhD theses of 2019 and will be re-published as a book in the Springer Theses collection. He is active on twitter. Here is a list of video links to talks he presented at various conferences, seminars, etc. A talks page on his website includes talk slides in addition to video links. A one-page listing of all the papers he's reviewed on his blog is here along with topic tags links.

Marius Millea, @cosmic_mar on twitter, is currently a BCCP Fellow at Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. He is a member of the Planck and South Pole Telescope collaborations and an advocate for the Julia programming language (e.g., see CMSLensing.jl along with his other Julia github repositories). In 2019, he teamed up with his former thesis advisor Lloyd Knox to write the widely known paper in the field, The Hubble Hunter's Guide. Another impactful paper relating to the Hubble tension problem that he was an author on is Sounds Discordant: Classical Distance Ladder & ΛCDM-based Determinations of the Cosmological Sound Horizon. A more recent paper is about his work in developing a new CMB lensing analysis tool, Optimal CMB Lensing Reconstruction and Parameter Estimation with SPTpol Data. The video of a talk he presented at the Perimeter Institute about it is here. His full publication list is here and this is a list of video links to other talks he has given.

Deanna C. Hooper is currently a postdoc researcher at the University of Helsinki. One of her recent papers is [1910.04619] The synergy between CMB spectral distortions and anisotropies, which she summarized in a 20-tweet thread. More info and a link to her other papers here. She also has recorded a series of general talks about the universe on happs.tv and earlier on pscp.tv. In April 2020, she gave an interview presentation in the Cosmology Talk series on the topic: CMB spectral distortions are a prime untapped resource, based on the 1910.04619 paper.

Sesh Nadathur is the lead author of several papers on void-galaxy cross-correlation topics; e.g., see:    [2001.11044] Testing low-redshift cosmic acceleration with large-scale structure    [1904.01030] Beyond BAO: improving cosmological constraints from BOSS with measurement of the void-galaxy cross-correlation    [1805.09349] A Zeldovich reconstruction method for measuring redshift space distortions using cosmic voids    [1712.07575] An accurate linear model for redshift space distortions in the void-galaxy correlation function. This article summarizes his work on the 1904.01030 paper. Sesh discusses his work in an ~1 hour Cosmology Talks video session with host Shaun Hotchkiss. Cosmology Talks is a effort by Shaun started in Feb. 2020 to present cosmological talks aimed at being an online equivalent of a departmental seminar.

Benedikt Diemer, computational astrophysicist, creator of the python-based Colossus cosmology toolkit, which is outlined elsewhere in this blog and also in this reddit post .

Dillon Brout has several roles with the Dark Energy Survey which he outlines on his personal web site and in this DES article from several years ago. He is part of the SH0ES team. A recent paper with Dan Scolnic is “It's Dust: Solving the Mysteries of the Intrinsic Scatter and Host-Galaxy Dependence of Standardized Type Ia Supernova Brightnesses”, arxiv:2004.10206, which he summarizes in this tweet thread. In July 2019, he was an invited speaker at a key KITP-UCSB conference on Hubble tension that convened many leading observational and theoretical cosmologists working on the issue. His talk and slides from that conference are here.

Peter B. Denton, theoretical neutrino and astroparticle physicist: [1908.03795] Eigenvectors from Eigenvalues: a survey of a basic identity in linear algebra | his reddit threads on this paper | on twitter |

Geoff Chih-Fan Chen, cosmologist using time-delay strong gravitational lensing (aka time-delay cosmography) to measure H₀. Lead author on [1907.02533] H0LiCOW: $H_0$ from three time-delay gravitational lens systems with adaptive optics imaging. Approved NOAO program info for 2020A key project and recently approved for 2021A to 2023A.

Olof Nebrin, fuzzy dark matter researcher | [1812.09760] Fuzzy Dark Matter at Cosmic Dawn: New 21-cm Constraints | blog |

Jocelyn Read, relativistic astrophysics, seminar video: “Matter in neutron-star mergers“

Vijay Varma, gravitational wave and numerical relativity physicist. author of the binary black hole explorer: on-the-fly interactive visualizations of precessing binary black holes.

Maximiliano Isi, gravitational wave physics | 2018 Everhart Lecture |

Risa Wechsler, astrophysicist/cosmologist, TED Talk on the search for dark matter

Mike Troxel, weak gravitational lensing research

Katherine J. Mack, astrophysicist/cosmologist | [1910.02978] Investigating the Hubble Constant Tension |

Riccardo Antonelli, PhD student in string theory; one of my favorite blog posts on gravity and entropy in the early universe.

Astroparticle Bites, regular posts commenting on recent astroparticle physics papers, written by current or recent graduate students.

Tags: #astrophysics, #cosmology, #H0, #neutrinos, #physics