My research focuses on building instruments that enable precision measurements of the very early universe. I build instruments that focus on two eras: cosmic microwave background radiation and the epoch of reionization. Both of these times in the universe require similar technology and my work has been to design, build, deploy these mm-wavelength cameras. Measurements with these instruments will significantly enhance our understanding of astronomy, fundamental physics, cosmology, and the large-scale structure of the universe.

Epoch of Reionization

The primary focus of my current instrumentation work is developing TIME, the Tomographic Ionized-carbon Intensity Mapping Experiment to test a new observational probe of the Epoch of Reionization (EoR), details of the TIME instrument can be found Crites et al. 2014). The Epoch of Reionization is the period of history of our universe between 200 Myr and 1 Gyr after the Big Bang (6 < z < 20), when the first baryonic objects collapsed in dark matter halos, ignited the first stars, and produced enough Lyman-continuum photons to reionize the surrounding neutral hydrogen gas. The physics during this epoch is largely unknown as it is one of the most observationally challenging epochs to study.

The Cosmic Microwave Background

My other primary area of focus is polarization-sensitive detectors for the measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Such measurements will significantly enhance our understanding of fundamental physics, cosmology and the large-scale structure of the universe. In particular, the search for the inflationary B-mode polarization is vitally important because it is one of the few experimental probes of inflation and as such could lead to a new understanding of physics at the highest energy scales. Additionally, measurements of lensing B-modes on small scales will allow us to put constraints on the sum of the mass of the neutrinos.