William East joined Perimeter Institute just over a year ago on a fellowship similar to those just announced, but has recently been promoted to a faculty member. His research focuses on extreme gravity systems like black holes and neutron stars. The recent craze in this area of research has been on gravitational waves, but East wants to take it a step further.
“The ultimate goal is to completely understand dynamical space-time,” East said. “I think in the next few years a lot of this work is going to be guided by the gravitational wave observations.”
Cosmology data analyst Kendrick Smith brings yet another interesting element to the team. With a Ph.D. in both physics and mathematics, he provides an incredibly powerful and unique combination of expertise to the project. His research focuses on studying the cosmic microwave background left behind by the Big Bang, and he has also recently joined the CHIME and HIRAX projects. His expertise in data analysis is allowing the Centre for the Universe to make important contributions in interpreting the information gathered by the CHIME experiment. The software he will be using is expected to make a major leap in our knowledge of fast radio bursts by detecting many more of these events.
“Only 25 FRBs have been found since their initial discovery in 2007, but CHIME is so powerful that it should find around 10 per day! We hope that this huge increase in statistics will solve the mystery of what causes fast radio bursts,” Smith said.
Solving The Universe’s Deepest Mysteries
When asked what he would personally like to see accomplished through the Centre for the Universe, Turok did not miss a beat.
“I want to understand the Big Bang,” he said.
The beginning of the universe involved the laws of physics taken to their absolute extreme. Physicists know that both gravity and quantum mechanics were involved, but these two theories famously disagree with each other. This is a fairly major problem in theoretical physics, which is exciting to researchers. Advancements have been made in both theories since their conception, and Turok believes it is time for a new comprehensive theory to marry the two.
“What’s most exciting to me is that this new way of studying gravity in combination with quantum mechanics is pointing us to new and better ways to describing the Big Bang itself,” he said. “My sense is that the whole field is ready for major advances.”
The Centre for the Universe expects to work with CHIME, HIRAX, SKA and other telescopes to study gaps in our knowledge of dark energy and dark matter as well.
“These phenomena are probably clues toward new laws of physics, but we don't yet understand them in enough detail to elucidate their fundamental nature,” Smith said. “There are many fronts where we can hope to make progress: new experiments to take more precise measurements, new statistical and computing techniques, and new insight from theoretical physics.”
Black hole enthusiasts can expect to hear from the Centre for the Universe in May 2018 following a conference on “
black hole superradiance.” Theoretical calculations predict that through this effect, we might be able to find a completely new particle around the horizons of black holes called
axions. One of the pioneers of this approach is another young member of Perimeter’s faculty, Asimina Arvanitaki. She is a physicist renowned for her creative style of dreaming up novel experiments, opening the door to new ways of detecting previously invisible types of dark matter particles.
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
Interesting work has already begun at the Centre for the Universe, and we’ll see a great deal more as new technologies become available. The magnitude of potential is truly astonishing, and spirits are high for the hope of ushering in a new era of astrophysics.
“People have said quite recently that anything doable has basically been done already, and that there’s nothing much else we’ll ever understand. We are excited about the prospects of proving them to be so, so very wrong,” Turok said.