Benson Lab

We are experimental cosmologists, who build instruments and develop detectors to study the Universe and measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB); the relic radiation from the early Universe, which was emitted about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.  

Our research takes us to the very ends of the Earth, namely the South Pole, to build instruments that are designed to answer some of the biggest questions in cosmology: 

• What physics was responsible for the Big Bang?

• What is the content of the Universe?

• Can we detect new unknown relic particles?

• What is Dark Energy?

• Can we constrain the physics of Supermassive Black Holes?