Benjamin Zhang | University of Southern California

About me

I’m a physics PhD student at the University of Southern California, working with Prof. Kris Pardo. My current research interests are in novel methods to detect gravitational waves, and in probing the large-scale structure of the universe.

I’m also interested in using GPUs to speed up scientific computation, applying automatic differentiation to the same, and generally making computers go fast.

In my spare time, I like to hike, play complicated board games, and read entirely too much science fiction (read Greg Egan btw).

Research

Gravitational waves

With Prof. Kris Pardo, I am investigating a novel method of detecting gravitational waves in the microhertz range, using relative stellar astrometry – i.e., seeing stars change apparent position on the sky due to a passing gravitational wave.

This deflection is many orders of magnitude smaller than our ability to resolve stellar positions, so my focus is on new methods to search large (terabyte-scale) amounts of data for a gravitational wave signal efficiently.


Apparent deflection in stellar position across a hemisphere of the night sky, from a gravitational wave source at the black star. Modified from Wang+21.

Large-scale structure

With Prof. Khee-Gan Lee, I am exploring applications of probing the large-scale structure of the universe (the “cosmic web”) at cosmological redshifts of 1-2 (7-9 billion years before today) using Lyman-alpha tomography.