Cornell University's College of Arts & Sciences has awarded more than $2.5 million to 13 research projects across the sciences, social sciences and humanities in this latest round, for novel investigations ranging from quantum computing to foreign policy development and from heritage forensics to effects of climate change. To date the program has funded 34 projects for a total exceeding $6 million, all of it from philanthropy.

Expanding the scope of exploration is the focus of “Measuring the Structure and Evolution of Our Universe with Novel mm-Wavelength Spectrometers for the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope.” On-chip spectrometers are a promising new technology for developing ultra-sensitive cameras for studying faint astrophysical signals in the millimeter wavelength range, in particular from the epoch about one billion years after the Big Bang. Abigail Crites, assistant professor and the Fred Young Faculty Fellow in physics, and Michael Niemack, associate professor of physics and astronomy, will develop prototypes of these new detectors and test them in a cryogenic facility at Cornell. This laboratory demonstration will pave the way for developing larger scale spectrometers for deployment on the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert to investigate the structure and evolution of the universe.