Bela Abolfathi is a sixth year graduate student studying astrophysics (or more specifically, observational cosmology). She works on two ground-based experiments, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and the Vera Rubin Observatory (formerly known as LSST), which will map the Universe to help us better understand dark energy. This research is a natural continuation of…Continue Reading Student Spotlight: Bela Abolfathi
The goal of particle physics is to categorize and mathematically describe the properties and interactions of particles. It turns out that there exist more particles than one might assume, and the story gets more complicated the further back you look in the universe’s history. Shortly after the universe began, what physicists call the Big Bang,…Continue Reading Rethinking Matter Formation in the Early Universe
The Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM) has been tremendously successful in describing how the known particles interact with one another, whether it be how charged particles interact or how the fundamental particles obtain mass. Despite its successes, there are still a number of phenomena that have yet to be explained within the SM,…Continue Reading Emergent Solution to the Strong CP Problem