Raphael Flauger

Raphael M. Flauger is a German theoretical physicist and cosmologist .

Raphael Flauger studied physics at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg up to an intermediate diploma and at Imperial College London with a master’s degree in 2003. He received his doctorate in 2009 from Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas at Austin and was a post-doctoral student at Yale University and New York University . Flauger became an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in 2014 and an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 2015.

He is concerned with predictions about the early universe from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), in particular from data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the Planck Space Telescope . He also deals with quantum field theories , quantum gravity and string theory (both with phenomenological models and with formal aspects).

In 2014 he was involved in the criticism and rejection of the then sensational claims of the Bicep2 collaboration ( Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization ) to have found gravitational waves and indications of inflation in the CMB (before the analysis by the Planck telescope team). At that time he was at the Institute for Advanced Study (2013/14). As a doctoral student from Weinberg in Austin, Flauger had predicted the B-modes in the CMB as an indication of gravitational waves, which the Bicep2 collaboration believed to have found. Flauger then worked on phenomenological string theory models that predict observably large B-modes, while previously it was generally assumed that such B-modes were not predicted in string theory models because the associated energies are close to the GUT scale. According to Flauger and colleagues, this also opened up the possibility of checking string theory with CMB data. For example, he worked with Eva Silverstein and Liam McAllister to search for Axion signals in the CMB, which are predicted by some string theories.

For 2016 he received the New Horizons in Physics Prize . In 2015 he became a Sloan Research Fellow .

Web links

• Raphael M. Flauger joins Department of Physics, University of Texas 2015
• Homepage, University of Texas

Individual evidence

1. ↑ BICEP: Spacetime Ripples or Galaxy Dust ?, IAS 2015 ( Memento of the original from November 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Flauger, Weinberg, Tensor Microwave Background Fluctuations for Large Multipole Order, Phys. Rev. D, Volume 75, 2007, 123505, Arxiv
3. ^ Winner of the New Horizons in Physics Prize 2016
4. ↑ Press release from Flauger as Sloan Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University 2015 ( Memento of the original from March 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.