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.  If you’re a Rice student who’d like to get a sense of what my research entails, consider joining us for these meetings!

 

   

 

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.

Erqian (Eric) Cai

Eric was a Rice undergraduate (2022-25) astrophysics major.  During his senior thesis work with me, Eric studied 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 undergraduate (2024-27) physics major whose strong background in computer science has allowed her to progress quickly through projects over the past ~year. Maddy is studying 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 undergraduate (2024-27) astrophysics major who’s interested in finding signatures of new physics in the CMB.  Aden is studying a recently-reported detection of isotropic birefringence in CMB polarization data.

Ignacio Quiroz Vargas

Ignacio is a Rice undergraduate (2024-27) physics major whose advanced classwork and research activities build toward his ambitious goal of studying formal theory.  He’s studying the phenomenon of cosmological gravitational particle production in an FRW spacetime with nonzero spatial curvature and its possible connections with the origin of dark matter.

Roman Rothstein

Roman is a Rice undergraduate (2024-27) physics major whose astute questions and strong intuition are a welcome addition to my weekly group meetings.  He is studying the fluctuations of quantum scalar fields during an exceptionally long epoch of inflation in the early universe.

Raul Ramirez

Raul is a Rice undergraduate (2023-26) physics major.  He’s studying the cosmological electroweak phase transition in an extension of the Standard Model that allows for a first-order transition and the accompanying gravitational wave signatures.

Group Alumni

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

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.