Quantum Meets Cosmos: Carnegie Mellon Hosts Global COSMO-25 Conference
Heidi Opdyke
- Associate Dean of Marketing and Communications, MCS
- Email opdyke@andrew.cmu.edu
- Phone 412-268-9982
It can be hard to imagine that something as tiny as a particle could shape the entire universe. Yet, the interactions of elementary particles after the Big Bang planted the seeds for everything today — galaxies, stars, planets and life itself.
Connecting these extremes — the smallest building blocks of matter and the vast cosmos — is one of science’s greatest challenges. Tackling it demands collaboration across disciplines, from particle physics to cosmology. That’s why the International Conference on Particle Physics & Cosmology (COSMO) series was created: to bring together researchers who study the universe at its smallest and largest scales.
This year, the 28th conference in the series, COSMO-25, convened at Carnegie Mellon University’s Pittsburgh campus from Oct. 13–17, drawing nearly 250 scientists and students from institutions around the globe.
“CMU has a range of expertise in cosmology, astrophysics and particle physics, so we were thrilled and honored to host this year’s conference,” said Physics Professor Rachel Mandelbaum, head of CMU’s Department of Physics and a member of the McWilliams Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics.
The universe didn’t always look the way it does now. In its earliest moments, it was unimaginably small and hot. To understand how it grew and evolved, scientists study both the tiniest particles and the largest cosmic structures. Some gather data from telescopes scanning the skies, while others conduct experiments that recreate early-universe conditions here on Earth. And particle theorists devise models that explain what their colleagues are observing. Together, these approaches help scientists piece together the story of our origins.
“It’s a big, big puzzle. It really takes work from more than one direction to solve it,” said Riccardo Penco, an associate professor in CMU’s Department of Physics and the conference’s lead organizer. “Our goal at the conference is to bring together the high-energy theorists with observational cosmologists and astrophysicists to exchange ideas and learn from each other's perspectives.”
Sessions at this year’s COSMO-25 conference explored topics including understanding the particle nature of dark matter, cosmic topology (the study of the overall shape of the universe), what new clues have been found in the faint glow left over from the Big Bang, recent discoveries about dark energy, and how AI is ushering in a new era for cosmology.
Another important goal of the conference is to encourage and engage the next generation of cosmologists. Penco noted that about half of the participants were students, which, he said, bodes well for the future of the field.
More than two dozen CMU graduate and undergraduate students participated in the conference, presenting posters, giving parallel talks, networking with leading cosmologists and volunteering to help run the event.
Fran Stedman, a senior physics major and president of CMU’s Society for Physics Students, presented a poster detailing her research on using machine learning to search for dark matter in the Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) planned for the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
“It was a good experience for me,” Stedman said. “A lot of people were asking questions that I didn't have a lot of knowledge of because I haven’t taken the particle physics class yet. Sometimes they were teaching me about things.”
It was Stedman’s first time attending a conference at this level. Not only did she meet with and learn from other participants, but she also volunteered to assist during the parallel sessions to help everything run smoothly and recruited her fellow physics majors to paint the Fence to welcome the conference attendees to campus.
Several Carnegie Mellon faculty members served on the local organizing committee along with Penco, including: Katelyn Breivik, Matteo Cremonesi, Rupert Croft, Tiziana Di Matteo, Valentina Dutta, Tao Han (University of Pittsburgh), Tina Kahniashvili, Rachel Mandelbaum, Antonella Palmese and Rachel Rosen. In addition to these scientific organizers, staff members in the Department of Physics, including senior administrative coordinator Kristine Perez, provided support for many aspects of the conference.
“It was nice to see the whole physics community getting together at all of these different levels to really make this happen,” Penco said.
To learn more about COSMO-25, please visit the conference website.
