Colin Hill and Oliver Philcox Among Winners of Buchalter Cosmology Prize

Written by Thomas Sumner January 24, 2023

Two men side by side: the left man has curly hair, glasses, and a beard, smiling outdoors; the right man has short brown hair, no glasses, and is smiling in an indoor setting. — Cosmologists Oliver Philcox (left) and Colin Hill (right) are among the co-authors of a paper that earned first prize in this year’s Buchalter Cosmology Prize.

First place for this year’s Buchalter Cosmology Prize went to a paper co-authored by Colin Hill, until recently a Flatiron Institute associate research scientist and currently an assistant professor at Columbia University, and Junior Fellow of the Simons Society of Fellows Oliver Philcox, also of Columbia. The prize aims to “support the development of new theories, observations, or methods, that can help illuminate the puzzle of cosmic expansion from first principles.”

The winning paper is titled “Squeezing f_NL out of the matter bispectrum with consistency relations.” Lead author Samuel Goldstein of Columbia University, who is a first-year Ph.D. student of Hill’s, co-authored the paper with Hill, Philcox, Angelo Esposito of the Sapienza University of Rome, Lam Hui of Columbia University, Roman Scoccimarro of New York University and Maximilian Abitbol of the University of Oxford.

The paper, published in Physical Review D, explores using consistency relations to obtain nonperturbative information about the initial conditions of our universe. As first-place winners of the Buchalter Cosmology Prize, the authors will split $10,000 of prize money.