Paul O'Connor (BNL), "LuSEE-Night"

Monday 9 Feb 2026, 12:45 → 14:00 US/Eastern

D-122 (SBU Physics building)

Elizabeth Worcester, Valerio Dao (Stony Brook University)

12:45 → 13:30 LuSEE-Night: a pathfinder for Dark Ages cosmology from the lunar far side

The least-studied epoch in the cosmic timeline is the so-called Dark Ages, the ~100 million years from the formation of neutral atoms until reionization and gravitational collapse led to stars and galaxies. The one possible observational probe is from the absorption and emission of CMB photons via the hyperfine 21-cm transition of HI, whose rest frame energy in the microwave is highly redshifted to the 1-50 MHz range. By measuring the global 21cm spectrum over a redshift range 30 < z < 300, we can in principle learn about the thermal history of the universe in a relatively pristine state without astrophysics. However, terrestrial radio telescopes are unable to detect this signal due to ionospheric opacity, as well as RFI which also interferes markedly with Earth-orbiting telescopes.

LuSEE-Night is a collaboration between NASA, DOE, and private industry to build, transport, and operate a radio spectrometer to the far side of the Moon in 2027. I'll give a description of the electronic hardware developed in the Instrumentation Department of Brookhaven, how it supports the cosmology goals, and the challenges of lunar night survival.

Speaker: Paul O'Connor