Amedeo Balbi

In bookstores

The Music of the Big Bang

The Cosmic Microwave Background and the New Cosmology

Springer

A popular science book on cosmology and the cosmic microwave background

Buy on Amazon

Research

Cosmic Microwave Background

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) (discovered in 1964 by Nobel Laureates Arno Penzias e Robert Wilson) is the afterglow of the big bang. Cosmologists seek tiny fluctuations in the intensity of the CMB, because they encode a wealth of precious information about the early universe. In the past few years, accurate pictures of the CMB have been taken by a number of experiments. The first was the COBE satellite by NASA, in 1992 (the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for this discovery). Currently, the most accurate results are those obtained by the WMAP satellite by NASA.

Analyzing these experimental data and exploring implications for cosmological theories is one of my research activities.

Currently, I am involved in the Planck Surveyor collaboration. This is a space mission by ESA scheduled for launch on May 6, 2009. Its main goal is to produce detailed images of the CMB total intensity and polarization over the entire sky.

Previously, I was with George Smoot at the University of California at Berkeley, to work on MAXIMA, a balloon-borne experiment that, in 2000, produced one of the first high-resolution maps of the CMB. The results from MAXIMA put tight constraints on cosmological parameters, showing, for example, that we live in a flat universe. The MAXIMA official press release highlights the main results from MAXIMA. More information for non-specialists can be found here and here. Non-technical articles about the MAXIMA results appeared in Physics Today and Scientific American. The MAXIMA results also received some attention from the press: The San Francisco Chronicle, The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post and again The New York Times. MAXIMA results were also featured in the PBS TV program NOVA.

Dark Energy

Recent cosmological observations showed, suprisingly, that the expansion of the universe is currently accelerating. One of the possible explanations of this fact is that the universe is filled with a mysterious form of energy, called dark energy that has a gravitational repulsive behaviour. The existence of a such a component, the so-called cosmological constant was first postulated by Albert Einstein in 1917 - who later called it its "greatest blunder". Today, it seems that something very similar to a cosmological constant is present in the universe. One of the greatest challenges of cosmology and fundamental physics is to clarify the nature of this so-called dark energy. This is currently one of my main research interests.

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