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Despite tremendous recent progress, gaps remain in our knowledge of our cosmic history. For example, we have yet to make direct observations of Cosmic Dawn or the subsequent Epoch of Reionization. Together, these represent the important period when the first stars and galaxies were formed, dramatically altering their surroundings in the process. Radio telescopes targeting the 21cm line will open up these crucial epochs to direct observations in the next few years, filling in a missing chapter in our cosmic story. I will review our recent results from the field, including the latest developments from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA), giving an overview of its promise to provide exquisite constraints on reionization astrophysics. I will additionally discuss our parallel efforts to build a more complete and data-driven model of the low-frequency radio sky, as well as possible ways to leverage machine learning to perform large-scale analyses with our data.

BIO
Adrian Liu holds a Bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Physics. From 2012 to 2018 he served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Berkeley, first as a Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics Fellow, and then as a Hubble Fellow. He is now an Assistant Professor of Physics and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University, as well as an Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research. In 2020, he was awarded the John David Jackson Teaching Award at McGill, and was named a Sloan Research Fellow by the Sloan Foundation. His research interests lie at the intersection of data analysis and theory as applied to 21cm cosmology. He is a member of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array collaboration, which aims to survey our Universe during the Cosmic Dawn and Reionization epochs.

Host: Yi Mao