Figueroa and Loayza have received the third prize, endowed with 2,500 dollars, for the work “‘Stairway to Heaven’ -- Spectroscopy of Particle Couplings with Gravitational Waves”, and published in Physical Review D. This investigation, in which they have also participated Adrien Florio (Brookhaven National Laboratory) and Mauro Pieroni (Imperial College London), has been recognised by the jury as “an exciting work that proves the spectrum of relict gravitational waves can carry characteristic fingerprints of new particles encoded in a sequence of peaks in the power spectrum, which if detected, could be used to determine which particles and forces are relevant at energy scales much larger than those probed in particle colliders”.

Daniel G. Figueroa is a PhD in Physical Sciences from the Institute of Theoretical Physics (IFT) in Madrid, he has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Finland and Switzerland. Recently, he has obtained the position of Senior Scientist at the CSIC. Daniel Figueroa is a specialist in particle physics and cosmology of the early universe, and is a member of the LISA international collaboration, for the detection of gravitational waves in space. He is also a member of the international collaboration ET (Einstein Telescope), for the detection of gravitational waves on the ground with the third generation of terrestrial interferometric detectors.

Nicolás Loayza studied Physics at the San Francisco de Quito University (Ecuador). He has participated in the ICTP diploma program in the high energy, cosmology and astrophysics section working under the tutelage of Paolo Creminelli on a project on black holes. In 2020 he started his doctorate in theoretical physics at the University of Valencia-IFIC under the supervision of Daniel Figueroa. His doctoral work is focused on the theoretical and numerical study of the signals produced during the early universe in the form of gravitational waves.

The annual awards, created by Ari Buchalter in 2014, have been announced at the 241^st meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The award’s rotating jury is made up of leading cosmologists and theoretical physicists, including Claudia de Rham (Imperial College London), Matthew Johnson (York University and the Perimeter Institute) and Rafael Porto (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY).

Dr. Buchalter, a former astrophysicist turned entrepreneur, created the award based on his own research and experience in cosmology, and a belief that groundbreaking new discoveries in cosmology are still ahead, but may require challenging and breaking some accepted paradigms. today in this field. “All of the 2022 award winners exemplify the kind of innovative thinking that can advance our understanding of the universe”, he stated.

The first prize of this year’s edition has been awarded to Samuel Goldstein, Angelo Esposito, Oliver Philcox, Lam Hui, J. Colin Hill, Roman Scoccimarro and Maximilian Abitbol, for their work entitled “Squeezing f_NL out of the matter bispectrum with consistency relations”, and the second was awarded to Diego Blas and Alexander Jenkins, for their work entitled “Bridging the μHz gap in the gravitational-wave landscape with binary resonance”.

More information at: http://www.buchaltercosmologyprize.org/