Group

Here you can find information about the postdocs, grad students, and undergraduate researchers working with me and Prof. Mustafa Amin.  We hold joint group meetings weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon.

 

 

Current Group Members

 

Moira Venegas

Moira came to Rice in 2023 after having completed a Masters degree at the University of Santiago in Chile where she worked on axion cosmology.  Her Ph.D. will build upon her Masters work to continue exploring the observational signatures of new physics in cosmology.

Balin Armstrong

Balin began his Ph.D. at Rice in Fall 2024.  He has begun working with me to study the connections between primordial magnetic fields, gravitational waves, and the origin of the cosmological matter/antimatter asymmetry.

Eric Cai

Eric is a Rice U undergraduate (2022-2025) physics major.  Eric worked with me in the summer of 2024 to study ultraheavy compact dark matter and its signatures in a Windchime-like detector consisting of a 3D array of magnetically-levitated acceleration sensors.

Magdalena (Maddy) Whelley

Maddy is a Rice sophomore who has been working with me over the past year.  Her research project explores the effect of a cosmological axion string network on the polarization pattern of the cosmic microwave background radiation through the phenomenon of birefringence.

Aden Pugsley

Aden is a Rice sophomore physics major.  She’s interested in astrophysics and regularly attends my twice-weekly group meetings.  Aden has also begun studying black holes and dark matter.

Group Alumni

  • Anamitra Paul — Rice U undergraduate (2017-21) — moved to UT Austin for Ph.D.
  • Brandon Khek — Rice U undergraduate (2019-23) — moved to U Penn for Ph.D.
  • Enrico D. Schiappacasse — postdoc (2022-23) — moved to Santiago Chile for faculty
  • Mudit Jain — postdoc (2020-23) — moved to Kings College London for postdoc
  • Hong-Yi Zhang — Rice U graduate student (2018-23) supervised by Prof. Mustafa Amin — moved to T.D. Lee Institute for postdoc
  • Siyang Ling — Rice U graduate student (2019-24) — moved to Hong Kong City University for a postdoc
  • Ray Hagimoto — Rice U graduate student (2020-24) — moved to finance

Relativistic Astrophysics and Cosmology

The Physics and Astronomy Department at Rice University hosts an active group of theoretical physicists studying high-energy particle astrophysics and cosmology.  The group shares a common interest in the extreme environments that can be found at the Big Bang and at astrophysical accelerators throughout the Universe today.  Specific research topics include cosmological inflation and reheating, primordial gravitational waves, gamma ray bursts, particle acceleration and jet phenomena, neutron stars, black holes, and dark matter — to name a few!

T. W. Bonner Nuclear Laboratory

Rice University’s Bonner Lab is home to a group of particle physicists working on a trio of world-class experiments:  CMS, STAR, and XENON.

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, is now famous for its co-discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 along with its sister experiment, ATLAS.  Work is ongoing at CMS to prepare for the LHC’s high-luminosity upgrade, which will deliver an order of magnitude more data and possibly lead to a new discovery.

Meanwhile the STAR experiment, located at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven, NY,  creates and studies quark gluon plasma to learn about the nature of the strong nuclear force and the extreme environment in the first moments after the Big Bang.

Finally the XENON experiment, located at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in central Italy, seeks to discover the mysterious dark matter.  By not having seen evidence for dark matter yet, the experiment was able to place the world’s most stringent limits on how strongly dark matter can interact with regular matter.  Currently XENON is in the process of upgrading their detector to test for even more-weakly dark matter.

Neighboring research institutions

Going beyond the boundaries of Rice University, our corner of Texas is home to several active research groups with diverse interests ranging from high-energy particle physics and phenomenology to physical cosmology.