James Annis

James Annis

Scientist

 

Telephone: (630) 840-5181    E-mail: annis@fnal.gov    Office Location: WH7W
Personal Web: http://home.fnal.gov/~annis/

 

 

Scientific Interest


I study astronomy and cosmology using sky surveys, first the SDSS, now with the DES, and soon with DESI and LSST.

I have two main scientific interests. Clusters of galaxies allow cosmology to be derived and structure formation to be checked; LRG are the galaxy counterparts to clusters; stacked weak lensing of both allows masses to be assigned; correlation functions allow tight connection to simulations. We are very interested in the cross-correlation of data sets between DES and LSST/DESC and the CMB data coming from SPT, ACT and soon CMB-S4.

The second main interest is in gravitational wave cosmology using the sources detected by LIGO and followed up with Blanco/DECam and other telescope. The gravitational wave detection provides a luminosity distance. If the source involves a neutron star, then we can detect the resulting kilonova, measure a redshift and then compute a cosmology. For sources that only involve black holes we will have to perform statistical redshifts and extract a cosmology. The next generation ground based gravitational wave detectors are expected to be able to hear every black hole merger in the observable universe and I’m very excited by that prospect and the prospect of gravitational wave spectroscopy of merging neutron stars at a few kilohertz.