Photo by John Zich/University of Chicago

One of the premier probes of the Universe is the Cosmic Microwave Background, the leftover light from the Big Bang. I have joined two CMB experiments: the Simons Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile (17,000 feet above sea level) and the SPIDER balloon experiment at the South Pole. The Simons Observatory has the potential to discover gravitational waves from the early inflationary period, a “smoking gun” of cosmic inflation and a test of specific inflationary models. Other goals include learning about properties of subatomic neutrino particles, formation of large scale structures in the Universe, and looking for signals of physics from Beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics.