Bio: Sandy Miarecki is a retired Air Force test pilot, PhD graduate of the University of California-Berkeley, and an affiliate member of LBL after completing her dissertation research at LBL.  She is currently an assistant professor of physics at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The IceCube Detector at the South Pole was […]

A large number of astrophysical and cosmological observations at different scales supports the existence of a cold dark matter component in the Universe. At the Universe scale, this component is uniformly distributed and represents roughly 26% of the total mass-energy density of the Universe. The Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), a generic particle, is one […]

One of the most exciting areas of research in cosmology is the effort to extract information about fundamental physics from observations of the universe on large scales.  With the advent of increasingly large cosmological datasets (and correspondingly small statistical uncertainties), future progress in the field will fundamentally be determined by our ability to understand and […]

The SuperCDMS experiment is a dark matter search that utilizes an array of 15 patterned Ge crystals, called iZIPs with a total mass of 9kg. SuperCDMS has completed operations at the Soudan Underground Laboratory and reported results on low-mass (M 10 GeV/c^2) WIMP search analysis with 1700 kg-days of exposure using 10 of the iZIP […]

We present recent results from the Telescope Array (TA) collaboration on the spectrum and anisotropy of cosmic rays from 1015 to 1020 eV. The simple power law spectrum thought to be exhibited by cosmic rays is now known to be considerably more complex, with at least four features present in this energy region in addition […]

The Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effect is an important observational signature of galaxy clusters, the largest objects in the Universe today. In particular, the pairwise kinematic SZ signal probes the matter-velocity correlation function, scaled by the average optical depth of galaxy clusters, and is thus an interesting probe both from a cosmological and astrophysical point of view. […]

Recent all-sky transient searches have discovered new and unexpected explosion types that fall outside traditional SN classification schemes. These exotic outliers in many cases are due to the deaths of massive stars and therefore may have been prevalent in the primordial universe because the Pop III IMF is thought to be top-heavy. Depending on the […]

The first step toward construction of a hybrid optical detector like THEIA is the demonstration of separation of scintillation and Cherenkov light in liquid scintillators (LS). This would allow reconstruction of particle directionality in a low energy threshold detector, and provide improved particle identification. The CHESS experiment successfully images Cherenkov rings on LS such as […]

Prevailing models of antineutrino emission by nuclear reactors do not agree with observations. This discrepancy has been considered possible evidence for neutrino oscillation to non-interacting, or sterile, neutrino states. Although the existence of sterile neutrinos would have profound implications, a variety of measurements by the Daya Bay Experiment disfavor sterile models. I will summarize these […]

Adaptive optics correct for the blurring effects of the Earth’s atmosphere. However, most AO systems today suffer from limited fields of view and point spread functions that vary over time and position. I will present results from several experiments to overcome these limitations. We have deployed a ground-layer adaptive optics experiment on the UH 2.2 […]

The evidence for the existence of Dark Matter is well supported by many cosmological observations. But we have not yet been able to determine how this new type of matter fits into our understanding of the Universe on the smallest scales. Separately, long standing problems within the Standard Model point to new weakly interacting particles […]

The large-scale local bias parameters of dark matter halos are essential to describe the statistics of halos and galaxies on large scales, as well as for the halo model of the matter distribution. Using so-called separate universe simulations, we recently obtained precise measurements of the three leading bias parameters. For b2 and b3, these are […]

LIGO’s gravitational waves (GWs) detection has inaugurated an era to test the foundations of gravity. This includes also probing the nature of Dark Energy. Theories explaining the present acceleration of the Universe beyond the cosmological constant typically require adding extra gravitational degrees of freedom. This can lead to distinct signatures in the propagation of GWs. […]

Neutrinoless double beta (0νββ) decay is the only process which can feasibly investigate the Majorana nature of neutrinos and total lepton number conservation. A broad international experimental program requiring considerable resources is being mounted to search for 0νββ decay in the region of parameter space allowed for Inverted Ordering. The Bayesian discovery probability of future […]

In the era of precision cosmology, systematic uncertainty is quickly becoming the limiting factor in modern cosmological analyses. In my work, I discuss a method for performing supernova analyses by combining a hierarchical Bayesian framework with Monte-Carlo simulation realisations. This gains both the flexibility and speed of an analytic analysis along with the nuance and […]

The Milky Way's dust is of basic importance in astronomy. It is both crucial to the formation of stars and is a pervasive observational nuisance. Despite the dust's importance, existing dust maps are largely limited to two dimensions, with the distance to the dust unknown. The advent of large surveys like Pan-STARRS1 has allowed us […]

Over the past few years, clustering-based redshift estimation has emerged as a new way to estimate redshifts and perform extragalactic tomography of arbitrary datasets. On a similar timescale, observations by Planck, WISE, Pan-STARRS and 21cm radio surveys have been used to create a multitude of SFD-type Galactic dust maps. I will explain how clustering-based redshift […]

Neutron-star mergers and core-collapse supernovae are promising events to herald a new era of multi-messenger astronomy, as they release substantial amounts of energy in gravitational waves, neutrinos, and electromagnetic emission. Moreover, these events are connected to long-standing physics questions related to, e.g., heavy-element nucleosynthesis, gamma-ray bursts, and the nuclear equation of state. However, while offering […]

Cataloging is challenging in crowded fields because sources are extremely covariant with their neighbors and blending makes even the number of sources ambiguous. We present the first optical probabilistic stellar catalog, cataloging a crowded (~0.1 sources per pixel) Sloan Digital Sky Survey r band image from M2. Probabilistic cataloging returns an ensemble of catalogs inferred […]