When it comes to mining the Moon, and how best to extract those critical resources, for fuelling our further exploration of the Solar System this massive review paper will be seen as a critical resource itself! Incredibly work by Matthew Shaw and Matthew Humbert, two doctoral candidates within the Extraterrestrial Resource Processing group led by Profs Geoff Brooks and Akbar Rhamdhani, at Swinburne’s Space Technology and Industry Institute.
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A wonderful new paper by my student Adam Batten. Mysterious explosions occur across the sky from distant galaxies, visible only with radio telescopes, known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). There illuminate the intervening material as they travel to our telescopes, allowing us to probe that otherwise hard to image Cosmic Web. But how do we know what that should look like? Simulations like EAGLE predict that distribution and in this beautiful work by Adam we can therefore shine simulated FRBs through this to create predictions for the dispersion measure. This then is directly tested by the telescopes.
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The latest CREDO paper is out, demonstrating that the signals we detect using your smartphone really are from cosmic rays. The way we can tell is that there is are many more cosmic rays hitting you (and your phone’s CCD!) from directly above relative to the horizon. This is a cosine squared dependency, and with some very clever modelling the team showed we could recover such a profile (as well as measuring the thickness of the CCD in the phones used in the study too which is neat!)
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Another amazing electronics paper from my PhD student Shanti Krishnan accepted for publication in the Journal of Instrumentation, focussed on a novel (and very cheap!) way to improve SiPM sensors.
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A mammoth undertaking with my colleague Dr Francis Froborg to write a review on dark matter detection methods covering 230 other articles, focussed on the annual modulation as the Earth goes around the Sun and apparent strength of the dark matter headwind changes over the seasons. Accepted in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics and available to all on arXiv. Also my thanks to the incredible James Josephides of Swinburne Astronomy Productions for his beautiful and informative infographic!
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