From The College of Arts and Sciences
At
6.20.24
Linda B. Glaser | College of Arts and Sciences
Doctoral candidates Zachary Huber, right, and Ben Keller install detector array components for the Simons Observatory in one of the dilution refrigerators in Michael Niemack’s laboratory. Michael Niemack/Provided
Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe was born in a blur of mystery. The new Simons Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert may soon answer the great scientific question of what happened in that tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
The Simons Observatory consists of a large aperture telescope and three smaller telescopes with about half a meter apertures – “very human-sized,” said Michael Niemack, professor of physics and astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, who leads the Cornell team in the multi-institution collaboration. Two of the small aperture telescopes have completed their initial testing and the first scientific observations have begun, marking a major milestone in the decade-long project.
Doctoral candidate Ben Keller and Princeton collaborator Suzanne Staggs install a detector array into one of the Simons Oservatory small aperture telescopes last October.
The large aperture telescope, when it comes online, will provide the best measurements of the Hubble constant and help explain why and how the universe is currently expanding, while the three small aperture telescopes will shed light on the initial inflation of the universe.
The large aperture telescope, said Niemack, is similar to the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) that he also works on, which Cornell and its partners are building in Chile, except that the Simons Observatory telescope is designed to work at longer wavelengths than FYST.
“The Simons Observatory telescopes can measure signals from the possible exponential expansion that we believe occurred a fraction of a second after the Big Bang,” said Niemack.
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Inflation
Alan Guth, from M.I.T., who first proposed cosmic inflation
Alan Guth’s original notes on inflation
The inflationary epoch is believed to have lasted from 10^−36 seconds to between 10^−33 and 10^−32 seconds after the Big Bang. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate. The re-acceleration of this slowing expansion due to dark energy began after the universe was already over 7.7 billion years old (5.4 billion years ago)
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The Dark Energy Survey
Dark Energy Camera [DECam] built at the DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
The Dark Energy Survey is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. The Dark Energy Survey began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013.
According to Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, gravity should lead to a slowing of the cosmic expansion. Yet, in 1998, two teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made the remarkable discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up.
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Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011 Expansion of the Universe
4 October 2011
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011
with one half to
Saul Perlmutter
The Supernova Cosmology Project
The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and The University of California-Berkeley,
and the other half jointly to
Brian P. Schmidt
The High-z Supernova Search Team, The Australian National University, Weston Creek, Australia.
and
The High-z Supernova Search Team,The Johns Hopkins University and The Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD.
Written in the stars
“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice…” *
What will be the final destiny of the Universe? Probably it will end in ice, if we are to believe this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics. They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Laureates themselves.
In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed by Saul Perlmutter, one of the teams had set to work in 1988. Brian Schmidt headed another team, launched at the end of 1994, where Adam Riess was to play a crucial role.
The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.
The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called Type 1a supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected – this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion.
For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the Universe will end in ice.
The acceleration is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma – perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore, the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.
*Robert Frost, Fire and Ice, 1920
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To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called Dark Energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.
The Dark Energy Survey is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of Dark Energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia are working on the project. The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project.
Over six years (2013-2019), the Dark Energy Survey collaboration used 758 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth. The survey imaged 5000 square degrees of the southern sky in five optical filters to obtain detailed information about each galaxy. A fraction of the survey time is used to observe smaller patches of sky roughly once a week to discover and study thousands of supernovae and other astrophysical transients.
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Cosmic Microwave Background [CMB] study history
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Those signals are fluctuations in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) caused by gravitational waves generated in the instant after the Big Bang. “These telescopes use some of the most advanced cosmic microwave background detector arrays ever built,” he said.
The beginning of scientific observations has been an exciting moment for Niemack’s team, which currently includes four undergraduate students, seven graduate students, three postdocs and a local high school volunteer. The team has spent years working on the detector array designs, as well as implementing and testing each of the subsystems of the telescope as part of the collaboration led by principal investigator Brian Keating of the University of California, San Diego.
“We have discoveries that we hope to make with these telescopes, but we don’t know for sure what we will learn about the universe and its earliest galaxies and galaxy clusters as these new telescopes come online,” said doctoral student Zachary Huber. “I’m excited to see these discoveries, whether they end up being the ones we expected or not.”
There are seven detector arrays in each of the small aperture telescopes, arranged in a hexagonal shape with one in the middle surrounded by the other six. Each of these arrays has almost 2,000 detectors inside it.
“The detectors have to be cooled to very low temperatures – minus 273 degrees C, or about a 10th of a degree above absolute zero, to make them extremely sensitive to the tiny changes in intensity of the light from the early universe that we measure with our telescopes,” Niemack said.
The detector array is very complex, Niemack said. Optical components actually gather the light; little antennas measure each of the two different linear polarizations of the light behind each of the optical components. Nano-fabricated structures transmit the light through circuits in the detector array and then convert that light into heat that can be measured using superconducting transition edge sensor devices that operate at the superconducting transition point, which enable them to be used as exquisitely sensitive thermometers.
Doctoral student Ben Keller, in addition to his work testing parts of the detector arrays for the telescope and characterizing the performance of the detectors, also got a particularly nerve-wracking job: he was one of the group who had to hand-carry the detector arrays from the U.S. to Chile.
“Since each array costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and is extremely fragile, carrying them through four airports was very daunting,” Keller said. “Of course, for the installation of them on the telescope we had to be even more careful.”
The Simons Observatory is located 17,000 feet up Cerro Toco in the Andes mountain range, which makes the work challenging and requires the use of oxygen supplementation.
“Working at that elevation was very exhausting,” Keller said. “The air is thin and the sun is really intense. On my first day there I got sunburned through two layers of clothing.”
Huber was in Chile last year with two of their Yale University collaborators installing several computers, networking devices, a massive storage drive and other computing infrastructure that will process and store data coming in from the telescopes. “Part of the motivation for joining this particular trip was that we will eventually need to procure and install very similar equipment for FYST,” said Huber, who has been working on doing that in the past year.
Even once all four Simons Observatory telescopes are actively doing science, the research and development for Niemack and his team on the instruments doesn’t end. Last year, the National Science Foundation announced $50 million in funding for the Simons Observatory, specifically to build more detectors and more optics for the large aperture telescope as well as solar panels to provide power to the observatory. That project is already underway, Niemack said.
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The College of Arts and Sciences is a division of Cornell University. It has been part of the university since its founding, although its name has changed over time. It grants bachelor’s degrees, and masters and doctorates through affiliation with the Cornell University Graduate School. Its major academic buildings are located on the Arts Quad and include some of the university’s oldest buildings. The college offers courses in many fields of study and is the largest college at Cornell by undergraduate enrollment.
Originally, the university’s faculty was undifferentiated, but with the founding of the Cornell Law School in 1886 and the concomitant self-segregation of the school’s lawyers, different departments and colleges formed.
Initially, the division that would become the College of Arts and Sciences was known as the Academic Department, but it was formally renamed in 1903. The College endowed the first professorships in American history, musicology, and American literature. Currently, the college teaches 4,100 undergraduates, with 600 full-time faculty members (and an unspecified number of lecturers) teaching 2,200 courses.
The Arts Quad is the site of Cornell’s original academic buildings and is home to many of the college’s programs. On the western side of the quad, at the top of Libe Slope, are Morrill Hall (completed in 1866), McGraw Hall (1872) and White Hall (1868). These simple but elegant buildings, built with native Cayuga bluestone, reflect Ezra Cornell’s utilitarianism and are known as Stone Row. The statue of Ezra Cornell, dating back to 1919, stands between Morrill and McGraw Halls. Across from this statue, in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, sits the statue of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s other co-founder and its first president.
Lincoln Hall (1888) also stands on the eastern face of the quad next to Goldwin Smith Hall. On the northern face are the domed Sibley Hall and Tjaden Hall (1883). Just off of the quad on the Slope, next to Tjaden, stands the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, designed by I. M. Pei. Stimson Hall (1902), Olin Library (1959) and Uris Library (1892), with Cornell’s landmark clocktower, McGraw Tower, stand on the southern end of the quad.
Olin Library replaced Boardman Hall (1892), the original location of the Cornell Law School. In 1992, an underground addition was made to the quad with Kroch Library, an extension of Olin Library that houses several special collections of the Cornell University Library, including the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.
Klarman Hall, the first new humanities building at Cornell in over 100 years, opened in 2016. Klarman houses the offices of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. The building is connected to, and surrounded on three sides by, Goldwin Smith Hall and fronts East Avenue.
Legends and lore about the Arts Quad and its statues can be found at Cornelliana.
The College of Arts and Sciences offers both undergraduate and graduate (through the Graduate School) degrees. The only undergraduate degree is the Bachelor of Arts. However, students may enroll in the dual-degree program, which allows them to pursue programs of study in two colleges and receive two different degrees. The faculties within the college are:
Africana Studies and Research Center*
American Studies
Anthropology
Archaeology
Asian-American Studies
Asian Studies
Astronomy/Astrophysics
Biology (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)
Biology & Society Major (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Human Ecology)
Chemistry and Chemical Biology
China and Asia-pacific Studies
Classics
Cognitive Studies
College Scholar Program (frees up to 40 selected students in each class from all degree requirements and allows them to fashion a plan of study conducive to achieving their ultimate intellectual goals; a senior thesis is required)
Comparative Literature
Computer Science (with the College of Engineering)
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Engineering)
Economics
English
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
German Studies
Government
History
History of Art
Human Biology
Independent Major
Information Science (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering)
Jewish Studies
John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Latin American Studies
Latino Studies
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Medieval Studies
Modern European Studies Concentration
Music
Near Eastern Studies
Philosophy
Physics
Psychology
Religious Studies
Romance Studies
Russian
Science and Technology Studies
Society for the Humanities
Sociology
Theatre, Film, and Dance
Visual Studies Undergraduate Concentration
*Africana Studies was an independent center reporting directly to the Provost until July 1, 2011.
Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.
Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.
On the Ithaca campus alone students representing every state and many countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.
Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”
The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.
Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through The State University of New York (SUNY) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.
Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners and Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, Truman Scholars, Gates Scholars, Olympic Medalists, current Fortune 500 CEOs, and billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of undergraduate and graduate students from all 50 American states and many countries.
History
Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.
Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.
Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.
Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.
Research
Cornell, a research university, is ranked highly in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and high in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission.
Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.
Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation , accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell is on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents and in forming start-up companies’
Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.
Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].
The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.
In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.
In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.
Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.
During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of the DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.
Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider (JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation.
The International Linear Collider (JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the The European Organization for Nuclear Research [La Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][Organization européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organization für Kernforschung](CH)[CERN] Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.
The Kavli Institute at Cornell (KIC) is devoted to the development and utilization of next-generation tools for exploring the nanoscale world.
As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.
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