Sponsor: Buenaventura Section
Speaker: Dr. Eric Huff of Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Meeting Date: 16 Aug 2024
Time: 06:00 PM to 08:30 PM
Cost:
Location: Westlake Village, California
Reservations: IEEE
Summary:
The discovery of the accelerating Universe in the late 90’s revealed that most of the Universe was made up of a form of “dark energy” not at that point known to physics. Since that time we’ve made some progress, but most of the big open questions remain. At this moment after the launch of Euclid and with the Nancy Grace Roman mission imminent, we are on the cusp of a major change in our understanding of the dark sector of the cosmos.

In this talk, I’ll discuss what we’ve learned about dark energy since the end of the 90’s,and summarize what we think we may learn by mapping the dark and luminous components of the Universe with missions like Euclid and Nancy Grace Roman.

Bio: Dr. Eric Huff of Jet Propulsion Laboratory was raised in Bullhead City, Arizona, and followed an early passion for physics to college in Tucson and a PhD at Berkeley, after which he spent four years as a CCAPP fellow at the Ohio State University. He’s done original work on a variety of topics, ranging from observational cosmology to tidal modeling of surface features on Jovian moons.. Currently, he is permanent staff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where he co-leads the Dark Sector cosmology group. His research focuses on developing new methods for extracting precise and accurate cosmology from wide-field cosmological survey programs. He has made significant contributions to shear measurement in the Dark Energy Survey, and is a member of the US Euclid Consortium.