Stony Brook University
Harriman Hall, Room 137
7:30 pm, Friday, March 01, 2024
Probing Fundamental Physics with Strong Gravitational Lensing
Prof. Simon Birrer
In general relativity, the presence of matter can curve spacetime, and the path of a light ray will be deflected as a result. This process is called gravitational lensing, analogous to the deflection of light by (e.g. glass) lenses in optics. In rare and extreme cases, light can take different paths to the observer and more than one image of the source will appear. Strong gravitational lensing is lensing that is strong enough to produce these multiple images, arcs, or even Einstein rings. Many insightful implications for cosmology have come from using this phenomena. Dr Birrer will shed more light on how astronomers are utilizing strong gravitational lensing to probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the dominant but yet unknown components of our Universe.
Professor Birrer started as an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook in January 2023. Previously, hee was a Kavli Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University (2019-2022) and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (2017-2019). Birrer received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2016 and did his undergraduate education (Bachelor and Master in Physics) at the same institution. Simon Birrer's research focus is to probe fundamental physics on cosmological scales. Birrer and his group are primary using gravitational lensing, a phenomena described by general relativity. Birrer’s scientific expertise is the interface between the exquisite data sets available on one side and the fundamental theory predictions on the other side. Birrer’s group is actively developing open-source advanced computational and statistical tools to extract detailed and robust information from strong lensing about the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
