报告人简介

Dr. Wei Cui is a professor in the Department of Astronomy at Tsinghua University (in China) and a fellow of the American Physical Society. He obtained his PhD degree in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994, and then joined MIT as a Research Scientist in the same year, to work on the construction and operation of the All-Sky Monitor (ASM) on the RXTE satellite and to carry out research on compact objects based on RXTE observations. In 2000, he joined the faculty of the Department of Physics at Purdue University as an Assistant Professor, and rose to the rank of Full Professor in 2009. He participated in the construction and operation of VERITAS, a state-of-the-art TeV gamma-ray observatory, and in the early development of LSST, a state-of-the-art optical survey telescope. In 2016, he accepted a joint appointment with Tsinghua University as Professor of Physics, and then joined the faculty of the newly-formed Department of Astronomy on a full-time basis. He is the PI of the proposed Hot Universe Baryon Surveyor (HUBS) mission. His present research interests lie mainly in instrumentation for astronomical applications and galaxy ecosystems. 

报告摘要

Hot Universe Baryon Surveyor (HUBS) is a proposed space-borne observatory for X-ray astronomy. The primary scientific objectives of the mission are to fill a void in probing the ecosystem of galaxies and thus to advance our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution, which is of fundamental importance in cosmology. More specifically, HUBS aims at directly detecting soft X-ray emission from diffuse gas of temperature exceeding 106 K, which is theoretically postulated to permeate the large structures in the cosmic web and also fill the extended halo of galaxies. However, although some indirect evidence exists, the presence of such hot gas has yet to be well established observationally, due to the lack of effective tools to probe it. In this talk, I will describe the design of HUBS, focusing on its scientific payload, which employs superconducting technologies, and particularly on progress in the development of TES microcalorimeters.