Velkomin / Welcome 👋
Síðan er á ensku en hægt er að lesa aðeins um Skuggsjá hér / We work on experiments probing the early universe, the nature of dark matter, and the birth of the first stars. From here you can take a quick tour of our efforts, read about our projects, or get in touch.
Optics and Telescopes
A key aspect of our research at the University of Iceland and Stockholm University focuses on optics design, characterization, and technology development for telescopes operating at millimetre wavelengths and the development of novel metamaterial resonators.
Funding Acknowledgment
Our efforts are supported by the Science Institute at the University of Iceland, The Stockholm University Physics Department and the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics. Our group efforts are funded by the European Research Council, the Icelandic Reseach Fund, the Swedish National Space Agency, the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education, the European Space Agency, and the Knut and Allice Wallenberg Foundation. We are truly thankful to these funding agencies!
Latest News
Members of the CMBeam team participated in Vísindavaka 2025, an annual science outreach event which is meant to inspire young people. This time, our booth was equipped with a 2.4-m diameter gravity demonstrator, some videos (in Icelandic) on various astrophysics activities at the University of Iceland, a Hoberman sphere, a few perpetual motion machines and Stirling engines, diffraction gratings, lasers, and calcite crystals.
We upgraded our gravity simulator from last year, going from 1.5 to 2.4-m diameter which allowed for a lot of new demonstrations. We were particularly happy with simulations of solar system formations which we could perform by giving every child 2-3 marbles and having half of them throwin clockwise and the other half counter-clockwise. After a bunch of collisions, only a few marbles would remain in orbit around the central mass and they were typically all going in the same direction!
We did have a slight scare early in the day: A tear appeared in the seam of the fabric near the center of the sheet. We literally had a tear in the fabric of spacetime… Thankfully Katrin Hekla was able to solve the problem since we had brought a thread and needle just in case :)
Gallery
A collection of photos from our group’s activities over the last few years.
