Matias Zaldarriaga | |
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Born | |
Citizenship | Argentine |
Alma mater | |
Known for | CMBFAST code [1] |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background [3] (1998) |
Doctoral advisor | Edmund Bertschinger |
Website | www |
Matias Zaldarriaga is a theoretical physicist best known for his work on cosmology. He has made significant contributions toward understanding both astrophysical phenomena and fundamental physics, most notably through his research on modeling the early universe and analyzing statistical properties of cosmic microwave background data. Zaldarriaga grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1994. He received his PhD in 1998 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Zaldarriaga was a faculty member at New York University and Harvard University, where he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. He is currently a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he has been a faculty member since 2009. [4]
Born in Coghlan neighbourhood, Buenos Aires, at the present time he works in the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. He is known especially for his work on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Together with Uros Seljak, he developed the CMBFAST code, the first computationally efficient method for computing the anisotropy of the CMB for an arbitrary set of cosmological parameters. In 2018, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
In 2003, he was awarded the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society, and in 2005 he won the Gribov Medal of the European Physical Society. In 2006, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. [5] In 2020, he was jointly awarded the Buchalter Cosmology Prize. [6] Zaldarriaga was awarded the 2021 Gruber Prize in Cosmology jointly with Uroš Seljak and Marc Kamionkowski, who together "introduced numerous techniques for the study of the large-scale structure of the universe as well as the properties of its first instant of existence." [7]
The cosmic microwave background, or relic radiation, is microwave radiation that fills all space in the observable universe. With a standard optical telescope, the background space between stars and galaxies is almost completely dark. However, a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope detects a faint background glow that is almost uniform and 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.
Rashid Alievich Sunyaev is a German, Soviet, and Russian astrophysicist of Tatar descent. He got his MS degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1966. He became a professor at MIPT in 1974. Sunyaev was the head of the High Energy Astrophysics Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and has been chief scientist of the Academy's Space Research Institute since 1992. He has also been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany since 1996, and Maureen and John Hendricks Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since 2010. In February 2022, he signed an open letter from Russian scientists and science journalists condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Phillip James Edwin Peebles is a Canadian-American astrophysicist, astronomer, and theoretical cosmologist who was Albert Einstein Professor in Science, emeritus, at Princeton University. He is widely regarded as one of the world's leading theoretical cosmologists in the period since 1970, with major theoretical contributions to primordial nucleosynthesis, dark matter, the cosmic microwave background, and structure formation.
The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-metre (390 in) diameter telescope located at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica. The telescope is designed for observations in the microwave, millimeter-wave, and submillimeter-wave regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, with the particular design goal of measuring the faint, diffuse emission from the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Key results include a wide and deep survey of discovering hundreds of clusters of galaxies using the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect, a sensitive 5 arcminute CMB power spectrum survey, and the first detection of B-mode polarized CMB.
In physical cosmology, CMBFAST is a computer code, written by Uroš Seljak and Matias Zaldarriaga, for computing the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background. It was the first efficient program to do so, reducing the time taken to compute the anisotropy from several days to a few minutes by using a novel semi-analytic line-of-sight approach.
George Fitzgerald Smoot III is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and the second contestant to win the $1 million prize on Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".
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The Gruber Prize in Cosmology, established in 2000, is one of three prestigious international awards worth US$500,000 awarded by the Gruber Foundation, a non-profit organization based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
In cosmology, the steady-state model or steady state theory is an alternative to the Big Bang theory. In the steady-state model, the density of matter in the expanding universe remains unchanged due to a continuous creation of matter, thus adhering to the perfect cosmological principle, a principle that says that the observable universe is always the same at any time and any place.
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.
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.
Licia Verde is an Italian cosmologist and theoretical physicist and currently ICREA Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Barcelona. Her research interests include large-scale structure, dark matter, dark energy, inflation and the cosmic microwave background.
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.
Hiranya Vajramani Peiris is a British astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, where she holds the Professorship of Astrophysics (1909). She is best known for her work on the cosmic microwave background radiation, and interdisciplinary links between cosmology and high-energy physics. She was one of 27 scientists who received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 for their "detailed maps of the early universe".
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Oliver Zahn is US/German theoretical astrophysicist, data scientist, and entrepreneur, best known for developing algorithms for astrophysical data analysis and widely cited discoveries of phenomena in the history of the Universe. He is also known for his more recent work as founder and CEO of Climax Foods, a California-based biotechnology company modeling dairy and other animal products directly from plant ingredients. Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Zahn directed UC Berkeley's Center for Cosmological Physics alongside George Smoot and Saul Perlmutter and was Head of Data Science at Google
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