Publications

• Frozen in Time: Voids as Pristine Laboratories of Physics

  arXiv:2509.07092 Why cosmic voids matter: pristine evolution

  The universe is constantly changing, making it notoriously difficult to track how structures evolve over time. To understand how voids grow and age, this paper uses cosmological simulations to track their evolution across 12.5 billion years of cosmic history. The results show that once the universe is old enough, voids settle into a calm and predictable state, passively following the expansion of the cosmos. That steadiness makes voids exceptionally reliable tools for testing dark energy and offers a clean laboratory for studying fundamental physics.

• SAIL: A Framework for Rigorous AI-Assisted Scientific Coding

  arXiv:2603.18145 Setting SAIL: Leveraging Scientist-AI-Loops for Rigorous Visualization Tools

  How can scientists use AI to create trustworthy code quickly? The SAIL framework solves this by putting researchers and AI coding assistants together in tight collaborative loops. By pairing human scientific expertise with AI code generation, fundamental principles stay rigorously verified while development speed accelerates.

• Predicting Cosmic Voids with AI

  arXiv:2502.05262 Cosmological Inference with Cosmic Voids and Neural Network Emulators

  Extracting statistics from cosmic voids usually requires running slow and expensive simulations. To bypass this, we built fast AI emulators that near instantly predict what cosmic voids look like across different theoretical universes. This allows us to extract far more information from the full void population, measuring the universe’s ingredients faster and more accurately, while remaining completely independent of the messy physics of normal matter.

• Do messy baryons spoil cosmic voids?

  arXiv:2312.11241 Why cosmic voids matter: mitigation of baryonic physics

  Ordinary matter (gas, stars) is notoriously difficult to model and can easily muddy cosmological measurements. To determine if these messy ‘baryonic’ effects also infect the emptiest regions of space, we measured them using high-resolution simulations both with and without gas physics. The answer: voids remain almost completely untouched, with changes occurring only on tiny scales. This confirms cosmic voids as some of the cleanest and most robust probes in modern cosmology.

• Simple dynamics inside the emptiest places

  arXiv:2210.02457 Why cosmic voids matter: nonlinear structure & linear dynamics

  While most of the cosmic web is defined by messy, complicated dynamics, this paper shows that the movement of matter and galaxies around cosmic voids remains beautifully simple. Detailed simulations across a huge range of scales reveal that these motions follow linear theory all the way down to small scales of 1 Mpc, making void environments exceptionally easy to model.

• Weighing neutrinos with cosmic emptiness

  arXiv:1905.00436 The bias of cosmic voids in the presence of massive neutrinos

  Neutrinos are particles with a tiny but unknown mass. Because they flow easily into cosmic voids, voids are unusually sensitive places to look for their effect, which could help us finally weigh them. This paper studies how the total mass of neutrinos changes the clustering of voids in simulations, and finds a clear, measurable signal that survives even when we use realistic galaxy-like tracers