Physics

Blanceflor-funded project: Direct Detection of Dark Energy

Blanceflor-funded project: Direct Detection of Dark Energy

Yesterday I found out, to my great delight that a proposal for a medium-small grant I applied to from the Blanceflor Foundation has received funding! (so now you know what this “proposal” mentioned in my earlier busy note was about - the “application” mentioned is still pending)

Top arXiv papers from Week 15, 2021

Top arXiv papers from Week 15, 2021

This week’s post covers a new measurement of H0 from fast radio bursts, a new compressed low-multipole Planck likelihood, and the first detailed study of the impact of the mass-sheet degeneracy in gravitational wave lensing. Enjoy!

Top arXiv papers from Week 14, 2021

Top arXiv papers from Week 14, 2021

This week’s post is devoted to the search of Jupiter’s lightning bolts (aka gamma-rays from dark matter), the construction of new astrophysically-motivated black hole mass function and subsequent search for the black hole mass gap, and a (unusual for this blog, I know!) philosophical discussion on the anthropic principle.

Top arXiv papers from Week 10, 2021

Top arXiv papers from Week 10, 2021

After being “away” a few weeks where I used this blog as a conference diary (see TMCC2021 and A (Hubble) Tension Headache), the usual arXiv posts return, covering primordial black holes as (not) dark matter, difficulties in constructing working and realistic early dark energy models, and biases to parameter constraints from the effect of baryonic feedback on the gravitational lensing of the CMB. Enjoy the read!

TMCC2021 conference diary

TMCC2021 conference diary

As explained in this earlier post, for this week and the next instead of running my usual weekly arXiv column, I’ll use this blog as a conference diary for two conferences I’ll be attending. I don’t yet know how this is going to pan out (in terms of format, etc.), I guess I’ll figure out on the fly what’s the best way of doing this, but don’t expect anything neat and orderly . This is pretty much the digital equivalent of the type of things I would jot down on the conference notepad if these conferences were happening in person (including possibly some extra-physics stuff from time to time, depending on how bored I am?). As such, take whatever is written here with a grain of salt. I hope you enjoy it!

Busy note 5 and update for the next two weeks

Busy note 5 and update for the next two weeks

A quick note to inform regular readers that my Week 7 reviews will have to be cancelled as I’m extremely busy preparing and recording my talks (at least one of which should later be available on Youtube) for these two conferences: “Tehran Meeting on Cosmology at the Crossroads” (next week), and “A (Hubble) Tension Headache” (week after the next), where I will be talking about spatial curvature and the Hubble tension (no surprise there) respectively.

Top arXiv papers from Week 6, 2021

Top arXiv papers from Week 6, 2021

This week’s post covers the resurgence of cosmic triangles in the context of the Hubble tension, how to use redshift drift to probe dark energy in a model-independent way, and how to self-calibrate polarization efficiency in CMB experiments. Enjoy the read and have a nice weekend!