(*: I recently moved to Berkeley, California, to start a 5-year position at the new Center for Cosmological Physics. Stay tuned for a redirect to my new site there. Thanks!)

Welcome. I'm a theoretical astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics , in the group of Matias Zaldarriaga. I hope to become a general purpose cosmologist, understanding the large scale structure and evolution of the universe using the methods of physics. More specifically, I'm modeling, using analytic and numerical techniques, how large scale structure (a network of galaxy clusters, filaments, sheets around voids in the universe) affects what we see when we try to look really deep, out to early ages. For example, so called secondary anisotropies are imprinted in the CMB (which is the image of the universe from the time it became neutral, around 400 thousand years after the big bang) by scattering of its photons off hot electrons. Another type of image is produced before the neutrality stopped and everything became ionized again, around 100 Million years into the universe's history. The path of photons is modified by gravitational light deflection along their path to us. In the past, we also did research on the effect of a variation of natural constants on the plasma in the early universe. Now these days my main hobby is studying the transition of the universe from its dark ages into enlightenment.

Before coming to Cambridge, MA, I was a student at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in Garching. I got my diploma in physics from the University of Munich. I received my PhD in January of '07 under the supervision of Matias Zaldarriaga and Matthias Bartelmann in Heidelberg. This site is in a very early stage, so don't mind flaws of incompleteness or redundancy.

Here are my coordinates:

Publications:

• Adam Lidz, Oliver Zahn, Matt McQuinn, Matias Zaldarriaga, Lars Hernquist: "Detecting the Rise and Fall of 21 cm Fluctuations with the Murchison Widefield Array", [astro-ph/0711.4373].
• Kendrick Smith, Oliver Zahn, Olivier Dore: "Detection of Gravitational Lensing in the Cosmic Microwave Background", [astro-ph/0705.3980].
• Oliver Zahn, Adam Lidz, Matthew McQuinn, Suvendra Dutta, Lars Hernquist, Matias Zaldarriaga, Steven R. Furlanetto: "Simulations and Analytic Calculations of Bubble growth during Hydrogen Reionization", Astrophysical Journal 654 (2006) [astro-ph/0604177].
• Matt McQuinn, Adam Lidz, Oliver Zahn, Suvendra Dutta, Lars Hernquist, Matias Zaldarriaga: "The Morphology of HII regions during Reionization", submitted to Astrophysical Journal [astro-ph/0610094].
• Adam Lidz & Oliver Zahn et al.: "Higher Order Contributions to the 21 cm Power Spectrum", submitted to Astrophysical Journal [astro-ph/0610054]
• Oliver Zahn & Matias Zaldarriaga: "Lensing Reconstruction using redshifted 21 cm Fluctuations", Astrophysical Journal 653 (2006) in press [astro-ph/0511547]
• Matt McQuinn, Oliver Zahn, Matias Zaldarriaga, Lars Hernquist, Steven R. Furlanetto: "Cosmological Parameter Estimation using 21 cm Radiation from the Epoch of Reionization", Astrophysical Journal 630 (2005) 643-656 [astro-ph/0512263].
• Matt McQuinn, Steven R. Furlanetto, Lars Hernquist, Oliver Zahn, Matias Zaldarriaga: "The Kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect from Reionization" Astrophysical Journal 630 (2005) 643-656 [astro-ph/0504189]
• Oliver Zahn, Matias Zaldarriaga, Lars Hernquist, Matt McQuinn: "The Influence of non-uniform Reionization on the CMB" Astrophysical Journal 630 (2005) 657-666, [astro-ph/0503166]
• Oliver Zahn & Matias Zaldarriaga: "Probing the Friedmann Equation during Recombination with future CMB experiments" Physical Review D67 (2003) [astro-ph/0212360]

simple CMB movies


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