Five ICCUB researchers are recipients of the Consolidación Investigadora 2022 Call. The aim of the call is to promote the consolidation of the professional career of researchers, encouraging the creation of permanent positions in the affiliated institutions and facilitating the start or consolidation of a line of research by financing their own R+D+ project.

• Teresa Antoja, Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Gaia group.
• Arnau Rios, Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Hadronic, Nuclear and Atomic Physics group.
• Javier Virto, Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Particle Physics Phenomenology group .
• Javier Menéndez, Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Hadronic, Nuclear and Atomic Physics group.
• Vincent Mathieu, Serra Hunter Lecturer at the Hadronic, Nuclear and Atomic Physics group.

Congratulations!

Héctor Gil-Marín, researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (ICCUB-IEEC) has won one of the seven 2023 Leonardo Grants in Physics awarded by the BBVA Foundation.

These grants are given to researchers with ages between 30 and 45 years old of exceptional talent that have highly interesting scientific projects. After thoroughly reviewing more than 100 applications, the BBVA evaluation committee decided to offer one of the grants to the ICCUB-IEEC physicist, to support his research on dark energy using the data of the DESI Survey with cutting-edge analysis techniques to maximize the return of information and characterize some of the properties of dark energy.

With this support, the Leonardo Grants aim to foster talent and originality in research. Each grant consists of a financial aid of 40.000€ that will help researchers carry out their project and strive towards professional consolidation.

The research project

The current understanding of the cosmos is governed by the standard model of LCDM cosmology, from its acronym Lambda-Cold Dark Matter, proposed at the end of the 20th century. This model postulates the existence of a mysterious fluid, dark energy, which would explain the accelerated expansion of the universe. According to the most recent observations, this fluid represents about 69% of the total energy content of the universe. However, despite being the dominant element and key to understanding the future evolution of the cosmos, we know very little about its dynamics or nature.

“Dark energy”, explains Héctor Gil-Marín, “is a label used to refer to something of unknown nature to us, but which is necessary to explain the accelerated expansion of the universe. During the first 6,000 million years of our Cosmos, approximately the first half of its existence, the universe expanded less and less rapidly, and we can easily understand this as a consequence of the gravity of galaxies pulling on each other. Later on, however, the universe began to expand in an accelerated way, and due to that we postulated the existence of something that counteracts the force of gravity and makes the universe expand more and more rapidly. We coined this phenomenon with the name dark energy and it is one of the great mysteries of physics”.

In his project, Gil-Marín aims to shed light on this enigmatic component of the universe. To achieve this, the project will combine the latest data from the DESI (Dark Energy Survey Instrument) massive galaxy survey with cutting-edge, innovative analysis techniques, to maximize information return and characterize the properties of dark energy with greater precision. "What excites me the most," he says, "is the possibility of discovering something that conventional theory cannot explain, and opening the door to a revolution in physics."

About the researcher

Héctor Gil Marín (Barcelona, ​​1985) is a Ramón y Cajal postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB-IEEC). After obtaining his PhD in physics from the University of Barcelona in 2012, he was a postdoctoral researcher for three years at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. In 2015, he obtained a fellowship to continue his research at the Institute Lagrange in Paris and three years later, he joined the international project Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument from the University of Barcelona. In 2020, he received the Young Investigator in Theoretical Physics award from the Royal Spanish Physics Society and the BBVA Foundation for his outstanding contributions to the analysis and interpretation of galaxy mapping, which have allowed us to advance our understanding of the accelerated Universe.

The ICREA researcher from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) Licia Verde has been ranked among the top five Spanish female reseearchers of 2022 by the Research.com ranking of top female scientists in Spain, based on data collected from Microsoft Academic Graph on 06-12-2021.

Dr. Verde’s research focuses on the study of large-scale structure of the Universe and the analysis of galaxy surveys. Her research interests include theoretical cosmology, cosmic microwave background, large-scale structure, galaxy clusters, statistical applications and data analysis.

Her work has earned numerous recognitions, including the 2021 Rei Jaume I Award for Basic Research by the Rei Jaume I Foundation.

The research program coordinated by ICFO, with the participation of IFAE, ICN2, ICCUB, IN2UB, UPC and UAB, aims to develop technologies for the future Quantum Internet.

The Institutes’ Councils and their Executive Directorates express their shock and deep concern at the events unfolding in Ukraine. We strongly condemn the aggression by the Russian Federation government towards an independent Ukraine and demand that the diplomatic route and dialogue prevail. We would like to encourage everyone to find ways to help the Ukrainian people, and we share with you some links with initiatives to help Ukrainian researchers:

• https://www.iau.org/news/announcements/detail/ann22012/
• https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00647-w
• https://scienceforukraine.eu/help.html

Joint statement supported by:

ICCUB, IRCVM, IAUB, IRBio, UBICS, IPOA, GEOMODELS, INSA, IREA, UBneuro, IBUB, IN2UB, IQTC, IRE, IMUB, BEAT, IdRA, TransJus, IRCVM

We have witnessed the birth of a new era of scientific discoveries with the first detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO observatory in 2015. In the following years, other detectors such as Virgo and Kagra have become active, accompanied by a sustained improvement of the sensitivity of all detectors. These improvements have paid off: in each observing campaign the number of events has rapidly increased and qualitatively new phenomena have been observed. Thanks to these discoveries, we have learned an enormous amount about the Universe such as the existence of a whole range of black hole masses, the formation of heavy elements in neutron star collisions, the propagation of gravity to the speed of light, among many others.

As successful as these observatories have been, even more substantial upgrades are needed in order to fully unlock the potential that the study of gravitational waves encloses. Having this in mind, the idea of the ground-based gravitational wave observatory Einstein Telescope was conceived in 2005. The core concepts are fairly similar to previous ground-based detectors. The key modifications are mainly its length — it will be 10km long as opposed to 4km in LIGO and 3km in Virgo and Kagra — and its noise cancelling technology will allow it to detect waves down to 1 Hz — as opposed to LVK which are insensitive to waved below 30 Hz.

By virtue of these characteristics, the Einstein Telescope will allow us to probe a huge range of events, which will undoubtedly have a large impact in the fields of Astrophysics, Cosmology and Fundamental Physics.

• In the field of Astrophysics, we will be able to detect about a million black hole binaries and hundreds of thousands of binary neutron stars per year, achieving redshifts of 100 in the most optimistic scenarios. This extraordinary population study of binary coalesce will allow us to understand the various formation channels, including the possibility of primordial black holes if detected at redshifts higher than the formation of the first stars.
• Going to high redshift will also allow us to test the cosmological models, since waves propagate differently in different cosmologies. This will allow us to constrain the equation of state of the Universe, and in particular, to determine the content of dark energy.
• Regarding Fundamental Physics, the high signal-to-noise ratios expected in some binary black holes will allow us to study their quasi-normal modes in detail, with the corresponding constraints on horizon-scale physics. Moreover, we will be able to probe the equation of state of neutron stars to much higher precision, which gives us valuable information about QCD at high temperatures, complementary to collider experiments.

The idea of the Einstein Telescope has become a project with its inclusion in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) Roadmap 2021. Einstein Telescope will be part of the EU agenda for its establishment joining the currently over 50 European Research Infrastructures. The successful ESFRI proposal means that ET enters its 1 preparatory phase, which entails bringing the project to the level of legal, financial and technical maturity required for implementing it.

The European framework programme Horizon Europe has opened the call HORIZON-INFRA-2021-DEV-02 for those projects included in the ESFRI Roadmap to fund the preparatory phase. The ET collaboration is preparing a proposal that will be submitted during January 2022 which addresses the legal and financial framework, logistics, human resources, technical challenges and development plans among other important aspects related to the setting-up. The success of the ESFRI proposal, submitted by the Italian government and supported by Belgium, Netherlands, Poland and Spain, foresees the beginning of construction in 2026 and first observations in 2035.

The University of Barcelona through the ICCUB participates in the proposal, committing to contributions in computing and outreach. Moreover, some of the members of the gravitational waves group at the ICCUB are members of the Observational Science Board of ET, making our participation transversal. This early stage involvement with the experiment gives us the possibility of taking advantage of our previous expertise and growing in the directions we consider strategically relevant for the institute.

This is only the beginning of an exciting journey, which will open up new research avenues and collaboration. Please contact Juan Trenado (jtrenado@fqa.ub.edu) or Tomas Andrade (tandrade@icc.ub.ed) if you are interested in getting involved.

The former researcher of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB-IEEC), José Luís Bernal, received yesterday the XXV 2021 Doctoral Senate of the University of Barcelona Second Prize for his doctoral thesis "Cosmology on the Edge of the Λ-Cold Dark Matter”.

This award aims to distinguish the theses defended at the University of Barcelona that make relevant contributions to human knowledge and foster scientific progress.

Supervised by the ICCUB’s cosmologist Licia Verde, Dr Bernal defended his thesis at the University of Barcelona in 2019 and since then, he has obtained the recognition of the XVI Prize for the Spanish Doctoral Thesis in Astronomy and Astrophysics by the Spanish Astronomical Society (SEA) as well.

At the moment, he is doing a postdoctoral stay in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University (JHU,Baltimore, United States) where he continues his work on the use of different approaches to understand the nature of the early Universe, the dark matter and dark energy. These problems are approached both from a theoretical point of view and by analysing observational data with new statistical techniques. In addition to his work on stress in determining the Hubble constant, he is also interested in large-scale observations of the Universe, mapped using line intensities, and in galaxy surveys.

The Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB-IEEC) researcher, Héctor Gil Marín, has received the Young Theoretical Physics Researcher Award from the Spanish Royal Society of Physics (RSEF) and the BBVA Foundation.

The double ceremony, for the 2020 and 2021 awards, took place last Tuesday December 14 in Madrid and the director of the BBVA Foundation, Rafael Pardo, and the president of the RSEF, Luis Viña, hosted it.

 “This ceremony is a celebration of knowledge, and what we celebrate is the most solid alternative to irrationality, falsehood, relativism and charlatanism” highlights Rafael Pardo. “In a positive note, we also celebrate what historian Gerald Holton, winner of the Frontiers of Knowledge Award, referred to as the ‘Apollonian Spirit’, the search for beauty, the belief that the natural and social worlds are comprehensible, that it is possible to get closer to the truth, without ever reaching it, but closer and closer every time. Surely no other field represents this game and dialogue between observation and reason, between empirical proof and theory, as physics does”.

The jury highlighted Dr. Gil Marín’s outstanding contributions to the analysis and interpretation of galaxy mapping, advancing our understanding of the accelerated Universe, and being undoubtedly one of the most brilliant researchers in the field of the cosmology of his generation.

Dr. Gil-Marín was a member of the BOSS and eBOSS international collaborations and is a current researcher of DESI, where he plays a leading role in the survey mapping. He actively participated in the analysis of BOSS and eBOSS data, which resulted in the recently published largest three-dimensional map of the distribution of galaxies. His research focuses on the large-scale structure of the Universe, and he intends to answer one of the most fundamental questions in cosmology for the past 20 years, what drives the late-time accelerated expansion of the Universe.

About the Honoree

Dr. Héctor Gil-Marín obtained a PhD in Physics in 2012 at the Universitat de Barcelona. Prof. Gil-Marín has been a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth (UK) and a Lagrange fellow at the LPNHE at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris). From 2018, Dr. Gil-Marin holds a Junior Leader 'La Caixa' fellowship at the ICCUB.

Selected publications

• The Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: measurement of the BAO and growth rate of the structure of the luminous red galaxy sample from the anisotropic power spectrum between redshifts 0.6 and 1.0 Arxiv
• Blind Observers of the Sky. Arxiv
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: BAO measurement from the LOS-dependent power spectrum of DR12 BOSS galaxies. Arxiv
• The power spectrum and bispectrum of SDSS DR11 BOSS galaxies - I. Bias and gravity. Arxiv

More information:

• Website
• ORCID

An international team of astronomers led by the researcher Gemma Busquet of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB-IEEC), has been granted 306 telescope hours for their observational project “VOLS: The VLA Orion A Large Survey”.

This survey will observe the northern region of the molecular cloud Orion A using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array Telescope in New Mexico (USA) to build a census of the stellar population, characterize their radio emission and quantify their rates of mass loss (ejected from the star) and mass accretion (fallen into the star from the stellar disk) and how these quantities determine the final properties of stars.

The observations will focus on two radio frequency bands. This will be the first radio study to cover a large area of Orion A at subarcsecond resolution, improving the sensitivity by a factor of 20 compared to previous large-scale surveys in Orion.

The main goal of this survey is to study the evolution of young stellar objects (YSOs) and protostars (which are the earliest phases of the life of a star) to determine the properties of stars and planetary systems. The early stages of star and planet formation involve a balance between accretion and ejection of material during the gravitational collapse. This balance and the consequent protostellar evolution are crucial in determining the final properties of stars and their planetary systems.

In this context, both mass accretion rate and mass-loss rate are fundamental, albeit still uncertain, quantities in star formation. It is, therefore, logical to ask how these quantities evolve with time and, just as importantly, how they vary across the entire mass spectrum.

The team proposes the VLA Large Program VOLS to investigate how these rates vary with protostellar evolution, and how they depend on the initial conditions (i.e., the environment) and on the mass of the star.

To answer these questions, the team will use the Very Large Array Telescope to observe the northern part of the molecular cloud Orion A, covering an area of approximately 0,5 deg² (which is roughly four times the size of the moon in the sky). Orion A is the nearest star-forming complex containing a broad range of environments populated by protostars and YSOs with different masses and evolutionary stages, representing a testbed for star formation theories.

Together with previous datasets, such as Gaia DR3, VOLS will provide the ultimate correlation between the characteristics of the radio emission from YSOs and their properties. This project is crucial for the next generation of centimetric interferometers such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) or the ngVLA since it will provide a radio template of YSOs and protostars.

VOLS counts with 46 researchers around the globe, including several members of the ICCUB and the Institut of Space Sciences (ICE, CSIC).