Jens Chluba is a Professor of Cosmology and former Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester, UK. His main research interests include Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) science—specifically CMB spectral distortions, cosmological recombination and ionization history, cosmological parameter estimation, and the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect—as well as atomic physics, radiative transfer, and high-energy processes in the early Universe.
Previously, Prof. Chluba spent a year at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, UK. Before that, he was an Associate Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, working with Prof. Dr. Marc Kamionkowski. He also served as a Senior Research Associate at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) in Toronto, Canada. He studied physics at the Technical University of Hannover and the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany, obtaining his Diploma in Physics (equivalent to an M.Sc.) in 2001 at the Universitäts-Sternwarte Göttingen. In 2005, he completed his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Rashid Sunyaev, where he continued as a postdoctoral researcher until the fall of 2008.
The main objective of Prof. Chluba’s visit is to carry out a detailed forecast study on the sensitivity of two upcoming Cosmic Microwave Background experiments, TMS and LiteBIRD, in which the IAC is heavily involved, to spectral distortions caused by various physical processes in the early Universe. Prof. Chluba is a leading expert in this field and a long-standing collaborator of the IAC CMB group. He is also one of the key drivers of ongoing international efforts to measure CMB spectral distortions, most recently through the FOSSILmission proposal submitted to ESA's M8 call. In addition, he has been working on the theoretical modeling of Anomalous Microwave Emission (AME) and the interpretation of recent results obtained with QUIJOTE and other experiments. Beyond the CMB group, his expertise in the theoretical aspects of early Universe physics is also of interest to other IAC teams, particularly the Astroparticle Theory and Astroparticle Physics groups.
