We focus on connecting fundamental physics with astronomical observations to understand the fundamental laws of the Universe, and to unravel the nature of dark matter and dark energy. In particular, our active research directions include the epoch of reionization, extragalactic astronomy, the early Universe, dark matter indirect detection, neutron stars and black holes. We heavily involve in South Africa’s MeerKAT, Square Kilometre Array (SKA), Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) telescopes, LSST (Vera C. Rubin Observatory), FAST telescope and CMB Stage-4, and also use data from Atacama Cosmology Telescope, South Pole Telescope, ESO’s Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS), and Dark Energy Survey Instrument (DESI).

Personnel

Research

Research Interests:

• Radio Astronomy: Epoch of Reionization, Dark Matter search in radio wavelength, Pulsar Timing Array, 21-cm Intensity Mapping
• Extragalactic Astronomy: galaxy peculiar velocity field, thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect, dynamics of local group, near-field cosmology
• Theoretical Cosmology: the cosmic microwave background radiation, observational tests of inflation, gravity theories

Current Collaboration Projects:

• Hydrogen Epoch Reionization Array (HERA): Calibration and power spectra analysis
• Square Kilometer Array (SKA) team: EoR, HI, Cosmology Science working groups
• Rubin Observatory (LSST) science team
• CMB Stage-4 Survey

 Collaborators:

• Prof Rene Breton, The University of Manchester
• Prof Xuelei Chen, National Astronomical Observatory, China
• Prof Clive Dickinson, The University of Manchester
• Prof Yu Gao, Institute of High Energy Physics
• Prof Hongjian He, Shanghai JiaoTong University
• Prof Di Li, National Astronomical Observatory, China
• Prof Douglas Scott, University of British Columbia
• Prof Aaron Parsons, University of California at Berkeley
• Prof Denis Tramonte, Xian-JiaoTong Liverpool University
• Prof Ludovic Van Waerbeke, University of British Columbia
• Prof Amanda Weltman, University of Cape Town
• Prof Qiang Yuan, Purple Mountain Observatory

Media

NItheCS Seminar on viscous dark matter by Dr. Anslyn John

Recent Research Highlight

2. Detection of the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect (ISW) and thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect cross-correlations

The Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect refers to the redshift or blueshift experienced by cosmic microwave background photons due to the evolving gravitational potential, which, in principle, is correlated with thermal gas on large scales. In Ibitoye et al. (2024), we successfully detected this phenomenon using Planck data with a confidence level of 3.6 sigma. The left panel illustrates the real SZ-ISW correlated power spectrum alongside 100 simulations represented by colored curves, while the right panel displays the signal-to-noise ratio of the genuine SZ-ISW correlation compared to the 100 simulations. Additionally, we employed the cross-correlation power spectrum, as well as tSZ and ISW auto-spectra, to constrain cosmological parameters, yielding intriguing results concerning parameters such as H_0 and S_8. For further elaboration, interested readers are encouraged to consult Ibitoye et al. (2024).

Publication

Acknowledgement