Experimental Cosmology and Astrophysics

Professor
  Michael Niemack - C.V.
   niemack 'at' cornell.edu - (607) 255-0391

I received my Ph.D. from Princeton University for research on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT, photo above), which included designing the ACT optics (Fowler, Niemack, Dicker et al. 2007), building the largest (at the time) superconducting Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) detector arrays in the world (Niemack et al. 2008), and doing early "follow-up" work for ACT observations (Niemack et al. 2009).  ACT measurements have led to a variety of results (see publications), including the discovery of new galaxy clusters (e.g. Menanteau et al. 2012) and the first detection of the spectrum of gravitational lensing of the CMB (Das et al. 2011), which allowed us to break a degeneracy in the primordial CMB and show for the first time that the universe is dominated by dark energy using the CMB alone (Sherwin et al. 2011).  We also made the first detection of the kinematic Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect (Hand et al. 2012) by combining ACT measurements with data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey.

After Princeton I joined the Quantum Sensors Program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where I became involved in a range of research projects, including: designing ACTPol (Niemack et al. 2010), developing new Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) multiplexing techniques (Niemack et al. 2010b), and working on optics and detector systems for current and next generation microwave observatories (e.g. Niemack et al. 2012, Niemack 2016,). I am now an Assistant Professor in the Cornell Physics Department and the Laboratory of Elementary Particle Physics.