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Collaboration

High Energy Light Isotope eXperiment

High Energy Light Isotope eXperiment

A new NASA-supported payload to study high-energy isotopes of Beryllium cosmic-ray nuclei, as well as other light isotopes. They inform the creation and propagation history of cosmic rays through our Milky Way Galaxy. The instrument is planned to fly by high-altitude balloon in Antarctica in late 2023, or perhaps on an Arctic polar route from Sweden to Canada.

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Name Role Affiliations Email Phone Office Centers Research topics
Heather Allen Heather Allen Graduate Student Physics heather.allen@psu.edu --- 204 Osmond Laboratory CMA, IGC Cosmic Rays, Multimessenger Astrophysics
Yu Chen Yu Chen Graduate Student Physics yuc357@psu.edu 205 Osmond Laboratory CMA Cosmic Rays
Stephane Coutu Stephane Coutu Faculty Astronomy, Physics sxc56@psu.edu +1 814 865 2015 303H Osmond Laboratory CMA Cosmic Rays, Multimessenger Astrophysics
Samuel Adam Isaac Mognet Samuel Adam Isaac Mognet Faculty Physics sam378@psu.edu +1 814 865 6107 206E Osmond Laboratory CMA Cosmic Rays, Dark Matter
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.