Research

Other

Assorted and legacy projects — some still ongoing, some I've stepped back from.

SPT

The South Pole Telescope at twilight beneath the aurora australis.
The South Pole Telescope under the aurora australis.

The South Pole Telescope is a 10 m microwave telescope at the geographic South Pole. SPT studies the Cosmic Microwave Background — the leftover light from the Big Bang — with sub-arcminute angular resolution. I joined the collaboration as a graduate student at U Chicago and spent the austral winter of 2008 on-site as one of two winterovers. SPT-SZ, SPTpol, and SPT-3G have each in turn yielded a long stream of results; I've since moved on.

ARO — pulsar scintillometry

Canada's Algonquin Radio Observatory houses a 46 m dish where the technique of Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) was invented. We built new low-frequency feeds and digital backends there, and the lab still makes regular trips up to test new hardware. We also used the dish for pulsar scintillometry — treating interstellar plasma lensing as a natural 10-billion-kilometre interferometer to resolve structure inside pulsar emission regions — though I've since phased off that line of work. ARO remains an active test site for us.

HIRAX

The Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment is a southern-hemisphere 21cm intensity-mapping array in South Africa, complementary in many ways to CHIME. The 256-element system overview (Crichton et al., 2022) describes the design. HIRAX is ongoing and under construction; I'm a co-I, with the project driven primarily by collaborators in South Africa and elsewhere.