Steffen Gielen and Neil Turok
Our congratulations go out to Steffen Gielen, Royal Society research fellow in the School, for being awarded a Buchalter Cosmology Prize.
The Buchalter Cosmology Prize is an annual prize that seeks to stimulate ground-breaking theoretical, observational, or experimental work in cosmology that has the potential to produce a breakthrough advance in our understanding.
Alongside his collaborator Neil Turok, Steffen won the second prize for their paper "Perfect Quantum Cosmological Bounce" https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.021301. Their contribution was recognized by the judging panel as “an important work demonstrating that a combination of quantum theory and general relativity predicts a bounce smoothly bridging the previous collapse of the Universe to the origin of a new expansion.”
"I think the award recognizes the need for new ideas about the early universe, which go beyond the ‘established wisdom’ of a big bang followed by inflation,” Gielen said. “I see the prize as motivation for developing our model further to a stage where it can really challenge mainstream ideas about cosmology.”
Presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Wednesday, Steffen and Neil will be sharing the prize money of $5,000.
Posted on Monday 15th January 2018