PhD students Ashesh Khatua and Rustam Balafendiev are visiting Kavli IPMU in Japan as part of the CMB Inflate program. During the visit, they get an opportunity to work with some of the excellent researchers working on CMB research in Tokyo metropolitan area.

We had the privilege of welcoming Professor Jeffrey Mcmahon to our lab last week. Jeff is a pioneer in microwave optics who has made major contributions to some of the most advanced telescopes on the planet. During his visit, Jeff gave a talk for the public with the title: From Curiosity to the Cosmos: A Tale of Humanity’s Progress. Just before the talk was about to start, strong northern lights turned on above Reykjavik.

Members of the CMBeam team went on a site visit to Hedinn hf to track progress on the construction of our new cryostat. This cylindrical structure, approximately 1.5 m in diameter and 1.0 m in length, consists of three thermal stages: a 300-K vacuum vessel, a 40-K radiation shield, and a 4-K cold stage. The two cryogenic stages are cooled by a Bluefors PT420 pulse-tube cryocooler and are mechanically supported by six thermally isolating G10 flexures positioned near the mid-plane of the system. The cryostat provides sufficient volume to perform holographic measurements of the full three-lens refractor optical systems designed for the Taurus experiment as well as other refracting telescopes and optical tubes for the cosmic microwave background. This system represents the first cryostat ever built in Iceland.

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.