Heyang Long

What year are you in?
I am in my 4th year.

What group are you in?
Prof. Chris Hirata’s group.

Where are you from?
I am originally from Sichuan, China.

Describe your research in 200 words or fewer.
The evolution of the Universe following the Big Bang is determined by several factors such as the initial distribution of matter, the percentages of dark energy, dark matter and normal matter that compose the Universe. The model that parameterizes these factors and can surprisingly well describe the large- scale structure and evolution of Universe we observe today is called the standard cosmological model, also known as ΛCDM model. Cosmologists have made a lot of efforts to make accurate measurements and various tests of this model from different aspects, including building more powerful telescopes in remote areas and even in space, developing more advanced statistical methods to dig valuable
information from the tremendous amount of observational data, and theoretically proposing new cosmological probes or forecasting the prospects of certain experiments. My work lies in the theoretical side of this spectrum, in particular I have worked on simulating realistic images of Roman Telescope to study its weak lensing measurement systematic errors, which helps the community understand the performance of this future telescope. I have also studied the impact of relative velocity between dark matter and baryonic matter on the baryon acoustic oscillation 21cm signal, which helps sharpen our cosmological ruler when measure distance in the Universe.

What have you done in physics that you are proud of?
I feel the first first-author research paper is a milestone.

What have you done outside of physics that you are proud of?
I can cook authentic tasty Chinese food.

What are your future goals?
I’d strive to be a physicist who is capable of doing research independently as well as collaboratively and could explore my individual research interests out of pure curiosity as well as make contribution to the science community.