Maggie Li | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Cryoscope: A Cryogenic Infrared Survey Telescope in Antarctica

We present Cryoscope--a new 50 deg$^2$ field-of-view, 1.2 m aperture, $K_{dark}$ survey telescope to be located at Dome C, Antarctica. Cryoscope has an innovative optical-thermal design wherein the entire telescope is cryogenically cooled. Cryoscope also explores new detector technology to cost-effectively tile the full focal plane. Leveraging the dark Antarctic sky and minimizing telescope thermal emission, Cryoscope achieves unprecedented deep, wide, fast and red observations, matching and exceeding volumetric survey speeds from the Ultraviolet Explorer, Vera Rubin Observatory, Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, SPHEREx, and NEO Surveyor. By providing coverage beyond wavelengths of 2 $\mu$m, we aim to create the most comprehensive dynamic movie of the most obscured reaches of the Universe. Cryoscope will be a dedicated discovery engine for electromagnetic emission from coalescing compact binaries, Earth-like exoplanets orbiting cold stars, and multiple facets of time-domain, stellar and solar system science. In this paper, we describe the scientific drivers and technical innovations for this new discovery engine operating in the $K_{dark}$ passband, why we choose to deploy it in Antarctica, and the status of a fifth-scale prototype designed as a Pathfinder to retire technological risks prior to full-scale implementation. We plan to deploy the Cryoscope Pathfinder to Dome C in December 2026 and the full-scale telescope by 2030.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2023

Generative modeling of nucleon-nucleon interactions

Developing high-precision models of the nuclear force and propagating the associated uncertainties in quantum many-body calculations of nuclei and nuclear matter remain key challenges for ab initio nuclear theory. In the present work we demonstrate that generative machine learning models can construct novel instances of the nucleon-nucleon interaction when trained on existing potentials from the literature. In particular, we train the generative model on nucleon-nucleon potentials derived at second and third order in chiral effective field theory and at three different choices of the resolution scale. We then show that the model can be used to generate samples of the nucleon-nucleon potential drawn from a continuous distribution in the resolution scale parameter space. The generated potentials are shown to produce high-quality nucleon-nucleon scattering phase shifts. This work provides an important step toward a comprehensive estimation of theoretical uncertainties in nuclear many-body calculations that arise from the arbitrary choice of nuclear interaction and resolution scale. Source code for this project can be found at https://github.com/pswen2019/Glow-nuclear-potential.git.

nucl-th↗