Bhuvnesh Jain

My research area is cosmology and gravitational lensing. I am interested in understanding how small fluctuations in the early universe grew to form the large-scale structure observed today. This process is tied to nonlinear gravitational clustering and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Gravitational lensing, the shearing and magnification of light we receive from distant galaxies, is a powerful probe of these cosmological puzzles.
Lensing can produce multiple images in the strong lensing regime, amplify the light curves of stars due to microlensing, but more typically it leads to small distortions at the level of a few percent in the shapes of distant galaxies. This regime is known as weak lensing: it is used to map the mass distribution of galaxy clusters and the large-scale structure of the universe.

The properties of galaxies and their connection to the ambient dark matter is probed by imaging surveys of galaxies.  These massive surveys are transforming our understanding of the extra-galactic universe. I have worked on measurements from current surveys and forecasts for surveys, being planned for the coming decade, which will image distant galaxies out to redshifts of about 1 over a large fraction of the sky.

The people at Penn who work with me are: graduate students Derek Dolney, Michelle Caler and Hans Stabenau, and postdocs Mike Jarvis and Masahiro Takada (now faculty at Tohoku University, Japan). I also work with my colleague Gary Bernstein on weak lensing, and with the other splendid members of the astronomy group at Penn.

Spring 2005:  Astro 12: Introduction to Astronomy, Part II (Undergraduate)
Fall 2005: Astronomy 525: Modern Cosmology (Graduate) With Harrison Prentice-Mott, a junior at Penn, and my colleague Mark Devlin, I have built a table-top experiment that uses custom-built optical lenses to explore gravitational lensing. A must-see on your next visit to Philadelphia.

• At University of Pennsylvania since 2001

• Cosmological Constraints from the SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies. M. Tegmark, et al. 36 PRD pages, astro-ph/0608632
• N-Body Simulations of Alternate Gravity Models. Hans F. Stabenau, Buvnesh Jain. Submitted to PRD, astro-ph/0604038
• The Effect of Large-Scale Structure on the SDSS Galaxy Three-Point Correlation Function. R.C. Nichol, et al., Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc. 368 (2006) 1507-1514. Astro-ph/0602548
• Short GRB and binary black hole standard sirens as a probe of dark energy. Neal Dalal, Daniel E Holz, Scott A. Hughes, Bhuvnesh Jain. Submitted to PRD astro-ph/0601275
• PSF Anisotropy and Systematic Errors in Weak Lensing Surveys. Bhuvnesh Jain, Mike Jarvis, Gary Bernstein. JCAP 0602 (2006) 001 astro-ph/0510231
• Constraining Dark Energy with the Dark Energy Survey: Theoretical Challenges James Annis, et al., Submitted to the Dark Energy Task Force astro-ph/0510195
• Dark Energy Studies: Challenges to Computational Cosmology. James Annis, et al., Submitted to the Dark Energy Task Force astro-ph/0510194
• Systematic Errors in Future Weak Lensing Surveys: Requirements and Prospects for Self-Calibration. Dragan Huterer, Masahiro Takada, Gary Bernstein, and Bhuvnesh Jain. Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc. 366 (2006) 101-114 astro-ph/0506030
• Detection of Cosmic Magnification with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Ryan Scranton, et al., Astrophys. J. 633 (2005) 589-602. astro-ph/0504510
• Dark Energy Constraints from the CTIO Lensing Survey. Mike Jarvis, Bhuvnesh Jain, Gary Bernstein, Derek Dolney. Astrophys. J. 644 (2006) 71-79. astro-ph/0502243