Clement Pryke

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Clement Laurence Pryke (born 1968 in Wallasey, Cheshire, UK) is an English-American physicist, focusing in astrophysics and cosmology, particularly on the cosmic microwave background. [1] [2]

Education and career

Pryke worked from 1988 to 1989 as a research assistant at Thorn EMI Central Research Labs in the UK. [3] He graduated in physics from the University of Leeds in 1992 with a B.Sc. and in 1996 with a Ph.D. [4] His Ph.D. thesis Instrumentation development and experimental design for a next generation detector of the highest energy cosmic rays [5] was supervised by Alan Andrew Watson. At the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago, Pryke was from 1996 to 1999 a McCormick Fellow, from 1999 to 2000 a research scientist, and from 2001 to 2002 a senior research associate. [3] From 2002 to 2010 he was an assistant professor in the department of astronomy and astrophysics of the University of Chicago. [3] [6] In the department of physics and astronomy of the University of Minnesota, he was from 2010 to 2018 an associate professor and is since 2018 a full professor. [4] [7]

Pryke was elected in 2016 a Fellow of the American Physical Society, "for groundbreaking measurement and data analyses of the polarization of cosmic microwave background radiation, and for using the data to provide strong constraints on the composition and initial conditions of the early universe". [8] He was involved with the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI), [9] and QUaD microwave background polarization experiments, and is currently co-PI of the BICEP and Keck Array collaboration. [4] [10]

Related Research Articles

Physical cosmology Branch of cosmology which studies mathematical models of the universe

Physical cosmology is a branch of cosmology concerned with the study of cosmological models. A cosmological model, or simply cosmology, provides a description of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the universe and allows study of fundamental questions about its origin, structure, evolution, and ultimate fate. Cosmology as a science originated with the Copernican principle, which implies that celestial bodies obey identical physical laws to those on Earth, and Newtonian mechanics, which first allowed those physical laws to be understood.

Cosmic microwave background Electromagnetic radiation as a remnant from an early stage of the universe in Big Bang cosmology

In Big Bang cosmology the cosmic microwave background is electromagnetic radiation that is a remnant from an early stage of the universe, also known as "relic radiation". The CMB is faint cosmic background radiation filling all space. It is an important source of data on the early universe because it is the oldest electromagnetic radiation in the universe, dating to the epoch of recombination when the first atoms were formed. With a traditional optical telescope, the space between stars and galaxies is completely dark. However, a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope shows a faint background noise, or glow, almost uniform, that is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other object. This glow is strongest in the microwave region of the radio spectrum. The accidental discovery of the CMB in 1965 by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson was the culmination of work initiated in the 1940s, and earned the discoverers the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Clover would have been an experiment to measure the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background. It was approved for funding in late 2004, with the aim of having the full telescope operational by 2009. The project was jointly run by Cardiff University, Oxford University, the Cavendish Astrophysics Group and the University of Manchester.

Yun Wang

Yun Wang is a poet and cosmologist. She is originally from Gaoping, a small town near Zunyi, in Guizhou Province, China.

Atacama Cosmology Telescope Telescope in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) is a six-meter diameter telescope located on Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert in the north of Chile, near the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory. ACT makes high-sensitivity, high-resolution, microwave-wavelength surveys of the sky in order to study the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the relic radiation left by the Big Bang process. At an altitude of 5,190 metres (17,030 ft), it is one of the highest permanent, ground-based telescopes in the world.

The Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI) was a telescope installed at the U.S. National Science Foundation's Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. It was a 13-element interferometer operating between 26 and 36 GHz in ten bands. The instrument is similar in design to the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) and the Very Small Array (VSA). In 2001 The DASI team announced the most detailed measurements of the temperature, or power spectrum of the Cosmic microwave background (CMB). These results contained the first detection of the 2nd and 3rd acoustic peaks in the CMB, which were important evidence for inflation theory. This announcement was done in conjunction with the BOOMERanG and MAXIMA experiment. In 2002 the team reported the first detection of polarization anisotropies in the CMB.

Spider (polarimeter)

Spider is a balloon-borne experiment designed to search for primordial gravitational waves imprinted on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Measuring the strength of this signal puts limits on inflationary theory.

QUaD Ground-based cosmic microwave background polarization experiment

QUaD, an acronym for QUEST at DASI, was a ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiment at the South Pole. QUEST was the original name attributed to the bolometer detector instrument, while DASI is a famous CMB interferometry experiment credited with the first detection of CMB polarization. QUaD used the existing DASI mechanical infrastructure but replaced the DASI interferometric array with a bolometer detector at the end of a cassegrain optical system. The mount has housed the Keck Array since 2011.

Archeops

Archeops was a balloon-borne instrument dedicated to measuring the Cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies. The study of this radiation is essential to obtain precise information on the evolution of the Universe: density, Hubble constant, age of the Universe, etc. To achieve this goal, measurements were done with devices cooled down at 100mK temperature placed at the focus of a warm telescope. To avoid atmospheric disturbance the whole apparatus is placed on a gondola below a helium balloon that reaches 40 km altitude.

George Petros Efstathiou is a British astrophysicist who is Professor of Astrophysics (1909) at the University of Cambridge and was the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge from 2008 to 2013. He was previously Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford.

BICEP and Keck Array Series of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments at the South Pole

BICEP and the Keck Array are a series of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. They aim to measure the polarization of the CMB; in particular, measuring the B-mode of the CMB. The experiments have had five generations of instrumentation, consisting of BICEP1, BICEP2, the Keck Array, BICEP3, and the BICEP Array. The Keck Array started observations in 2012 and BICEP3 has been fully operational since May 2016, with the BICEP Array beginning installation in 2017/18.

Uroš Seljak

Uroš Seljak is a Slovenian cosmologist and a professor of astronomy and physics at University of California, Berkeley. He is particularly well-known for his research in cosmology and approximate Bayesian statistical methods.

Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor

The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is an array of microwave telescopes at a high-altitude site in the Atacama Desert of Chile as part of the Parque Astronómico de Atacama. The CLASS experiment aims to improve our understanding of cosmic dawn when the first stars turned on, test the theory of cosmic inflation, and distinguish between inflationary models of the very early universe by making precise measurements of the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) over 65% of the sky at multiple frequencies in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Marc Kamionkowski is an American theoretical physicist and currently the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include particle physics, dark matter, inflation, the cosmic microwave background and gravitational waves.

John Michael Kovac is an American physicist and astronomer. His cosmology research, conducted at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, focuses on observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) to reveal signatures of the physics that drove the birth of the universe, the creation of its structure, and its present-day expansion. Currently, Kovac is Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Harvard University.

Brian Keating American cosmologist

Brian Gregory Keating is an American cosmologist. He works on observations of the cosmic microwave background, leading the BICEP, POLARBEAR2 and Simons Array experiments. He received his PhD in 2000, and is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at University of California, San Diego since 2019. He is the author of two books, Losing The Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible.

Rafael Rebolo López

Rafael Rebolo López is a Spanish astrophysicist. In October 2013 he became the director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. He is a professor at the Spanish National Research Council. In 2002 Rebolo became an external professor at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and a member of the Max Planck Society.

Michele Limon is an Italian research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Limon studied physics at the Università degli Studi di Milano in Milan, Italy and completed his post-doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been conducting research for more than 30 years and has experience in the design of ground, balloon and space-based instrumentation. His academic specialties include Astrophysics, Cosmology, Instrumentation Development, and Cryogenics.

Erika Hamden American astrophysicist

Erika Tobiason Hamden is an American astrophysicist and Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory. Her research focuses on developing ultraviolet (UV) detector technology, ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy (UV/VIS) instrumentation and spectroscopy, and galaxy evolution. She served as the project scientist and project manager of a UV multi-object spectrograph, FIREBall-2, that is designed to observe the circumgalactic medium (CGM). She is a 2019 TED fellow.

References

  1. Pryke, C. (2012). "The Quest for Gravity Wave B-modes". arXiv preprint arXiv:1209.2768.
  2. "Clem Pryke | Center for Excellence in Sensing Technologies & Analytics".
  3. 1 2 3 "Curriculum Vita and Publication List for Clement Pryke" (PDF). University of Minnesota.
  4. 1 2 3 "Clement Pryke". School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota.
  5. "Instrumentation development and experimental design for a next generation detector of the highest energy cosmic rays by Clement Pryke". University of Leeds.
  6. "The Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics - Profile: Clement Pryke". astro.uchicago.edu.
  7. "Pryke leads research effort that improves constraints on Physics of Big Bang". School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota.
  8. "APS Fellow Archive". American Physical Society. (search on year=2016 and institution=University of Minnesota)
  9. Kovac, J. M.; Leitch, E. M.; Pryke, C.; Carlstrom, J. E.; Halverson, N. W.; Holzapfel, W. L. (2002). "Detection of polarization in the cosmic microwave background using DASI". Nature. 420 (6917): 772–787. doi:10.1038/nature01269.
  10. Pryke, C. (2020). "Searching for the imprint of cosmic inflation". Nature Astronomy. 4: 1204. doi:10.1038/s41550-020-01260-5.