New Location – This post is no longer maintained here and has been expanded and moved to this new location.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.
Two sets of White Paper submissions, Science and APC1, are available in response to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey. CSV files of info on them are available at that site. I took those source files and created searchable HTML pages with links to the PDF files for each paper. What's searchable is the paper title, the principal author and their institution, a short description of the paper, and (for the Science White Papers) the NASA ADS Bibcode record. The ADS data was extracted from an AAS Bulletin.
Each of the two searchable webpages has a link to the other, as well as to the source data. The webpages are self-contained with all the data included in the html file, which contains the javascript code for the searches and the CSS for styling.
The original purpose in doing this was because many of the submissions were not on the arXiv, and I wanted to see what else was available and also so the PDF file link were all on one page. In addition, though, the search feature has been very useful.
Slides from talk by Chris Tully at the Opening New Windows to the Universe forum at Brookhaven National Labs on 2021-11-03: PTOLEMY: Relic Neutrino Detection
New developments since this post was originally created: Cosmologist Sunny Vagnozzi shares some updated info on the PTOLEMY project status in a short thread here. He also mentions that he is collaborating on a paper about PTOLEMY with Stefano Gariazzo that will soon (as of March 2020) be posted on the arXiv.
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This is about paper 1902.05508, posted to the arXiv on 2/14/2019.
I was mostly unfamiliar with this groundbreaking project so this new paper provided a reading-up opportunity, leading to these general overview notes. I added the bolding for emphasis.
The PTOLEMY project1 aims to directly detect relic neutrinos from the cosmic neutrino background (CNB or CνB), along with a impressive broader set of capabilities or opportunities2a. The project is described as the “the first of its kind and the only one2b conceived that can look directly at the image of the Universe encoded in neutrino background produced in the first second after the Big Bang”.3 (pg2) Achieving the project's goal “would profoundly confront and extend the sensitivity of precision cosmology data.”(pg5) This paper addresses the theoretical aspects of the project, its physics goals, and an outline of the project's scope of work to be done in the next three years. An earlier paper 1808.01892 gives more details on three phases of the project: proof-of-principle demonstrator, scalable prototype realization and tests, and full detector construction.
The technology is based on neutrino capture on beta decaying nuclei (NCB)5, with tritium (3H) determined as the best choice. The capture results in a tiny boost of energy to the electrons emitted in tritium decay, so there'll be a peak in the electron spectrum above the β-decay endpoint4. The planned target is ∼100g of tritium atomically bound to a radio-pure graphene substrate (they refer to it as “tritiated graphene”). They expect ∼10 CνB capture events per year, depending on the mass hierarchy and the Dirac versus Majorana nature of the neutrinos; the rate is half as large for non-relativistic Dirac neutrinos2a. The anticipated energy resolution is ∼0.05eV, “an order of magnitude beyond the original target and the highest resolution of any calorimeter.” [source]