Benjamin D. Wandelt
Associate Professor of Physics and of Astronomy
Professor Benjamin Wandelt received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Imperial College, London. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Theoretical Astrophysics Center in Copenhagen, Denmark from 1997 to 1999, and as a research associate at the Department of Physics, Princeton University, from 1999 to 2001. He joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 2001.
A theoretical cosmologist, Professor Wandelt has studied a variety of problems in Cosmology. He is an internationally acclaimed expert in the analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) data, where he has invented innovative algorithms that make the analysis of huge new data sets tractable. Essentially all current efforts to observe the CMB anisotropy use his numerical and statistical methods for key stages in the theoretical interpretation of the data. By studying the properties of the CMB anisotropy one can learn about the physical processes that occurred in the very early Universe.
Recent projects of his included studying the bispectrum of the CMB anisotropy as measured by the space mission COBE/DMR in order to constrain the non-linearity of the perturbations created during inflation. Professor Wandelt has also participated in efforts to predict the properties of exotic forms of dark matter, designed to solve puzzles related to observations of the clustering properties of matter on galaxy scales.
Professor Wandelt is associated as a theorist with the ESA/NASA's Planck space mission to obtain the definitive maps of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, and detailed all-sky observations of other components of the microwave sky. He co-leads Planck's harmonic analysis effort and is an associate of the theory and simulations team. Through Professor Wandelt's work, our department is one of only a few select US institutions to be involved in this major international endeavor in cosmology.
Research Areas: theoretical cosmology; cosmic microwave background; structure formation; dark matter; large scale structure; early universe; mathematical, statistical, and computational methods applied to theory and observations in cosmology; data mining and analysis; weak gravitational lensing; Sunjaev-Zel'dovich effect.
Figure: A simulation of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy at the resolution of the space missions MAP and Planck.
Selected Publications
Mejia, J, O'Dwyer, I, and Wandelt, BD. Galactic foreground contribution to the BEAST cosmic microwave background anisotropy maps. Astrophys. J. Suppl. Series 158, 109-117 (2005).
Meinhold, PR, et al. A map of the cosmic microwave background from the BEAST experiment. Astrophys. J. Suppl. Series 158, 101-8 (2005).
Gorski, KM, et al. HEALPix: a framework for high-resolution discretization and fast analysis of data distributed on the sphere. Astrophys. J. 622, 759-771 (2005).
Armitage, C and Wandelt, BD. Deconvolution map-making for cosmic microwave background observations. Phys. Rev. D 70, 123007-1-7 (2004).
O'Dwyer, IJ, et al. Bayesian power spectrum analysis of the first-year Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe data. Astrophys. J. Lett. 617, L99-102 (2004).
Wandelt, BD. MAGIC: General, fast, exact Bayesian power spectrum estimation for cosmological data sets. Statistical Problems in Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology. SLAC, Stanford, CA, Sept. 2004. eConf Proceedings CO30908, 229-234 (2004).
Honors and Awards
- Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award, 2006
- Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, 2006
Other Pages
Statement of Research Interests
Cosmology@Home—a distributed computing project being developed by Professor Wandelt's group at the University of Illinois to enable participants to contribute actively to forefront research in precision cosmology by donating surplus CPU cycles.
