James J. (Jamie) Bock

I am an experimental cosmologist. My research program pioneers new technologies and develops unique experiments to study the early universe. Present research focuses on two experimental probes of cosmic inflation. The first is searching for an odd-parity (B-mode) polarization pattern in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), sourced by a background of gravitational waves produced during inflation. The latest phase of the BICEP program called the BICEP Array, joined with the South Pole Telescope to remove a polarization signal from gravitational lensing, promises to improve constraints on the amplitude of this signal by a factor of ~10 over the next decade. The gravitational wave signal is sensitive to the energy scale associated with inflation in single-field models. The second method searches for primordial non-Gaussianity, an observable that is sensitive to the number of fields responsible for inflation. The SPHEREx satellite is now observing large-scale structure in galaxy redshifts, aiming to improve constraints that are presently set by CMB observations by an order of magnitude. I have a continuing effort developing detector array technology, including transition-edge bolometers and thermal kinetic inductance detectors, for future CMB observations from space. My group also collaborates in the TIME instrument that is pioneering line intensity mapping C+ and CO emission, redshifted to millimeter wavelengths.