Recent News

• Oct. 20, 2025: Congratulations to Dr. Jianyang (Frank) Fu on his succesful Ph.D defense! He is headed off to Princeton as a Dicke Postdoctoral Fellow.
• Oct. 1, 2025: TIM's star camera system took to the air again, as a piggyback to the launch of PICTURE-D from Fort Sumner. TIMcam performed perfectly.
• May 14, 2025: Congratulations to Carina, who has been awarded a 2025 Graduate Student Research fellowship (SCGSR) from the DOE Office of Science! In collaboration with Dr. Katie Harrington (Argonne), she will develop methods to integrate meteorological data into CMB data analysis and forecasting.
• Apr. 1, 2025: Congratulations to Carina on passing her preliminary (candidacy) exam!


• Sep. 23, 2024: TIM is aloft! Our engineering test flight launched from Fort Sumner, NM at 0726 Mountain time. It flew for 8 hours, landed in Texas, and was successfully (and promptly) recovered.
• Aug. 1, 2024: TIM has arrived in Fort Sumner, NM for its engineering test flight, currently planned for late August / early September.
• July 30, 2024: New paper - polarized dust emission analysis with SPIDER-1 data.
• June 20, 2024: NASA has renewed funding for both SPIDER and TIM, enabling us to complete SPIDER's science data analysis and to fly TIM!
• May. 2, 2024: The TIM flight cryostat has reached a new milestone: a 205mK base temperature! Next stop, optics.
• Jan. 23, 2024: The TIM flight cryostat has been filled with liquid helium for the first time.


• Oct. 11, 2023: Congratulations to Dr. Elle Shaw on her successful defense!
• Mar. 21, 2023: Elle is a semi-finalist for for the 2023 Image of Research competition, for her photo of SPIDER and Erebus!
• Feb. 21, 2023: Congratulations to Dr. Rong Nie on his successful defense!
• Jan. 27, 2023: Read more about SPIDER's 2022 campaign at UIUC and WUSTL.


• Dec. 21, 2022: SPIDER-2 launched from Antarctica on a long-duration balloon at 21:27 UTC (10:27 local time Dec. 22), a mere 20 minutes from the solstice.
• Oct. 17, 2022: The SPIDER-2 deployment campaign has begun! Elle is on her way to Antarctica, with Sho and Jeff joining in the coming weeks. Her article describing the summer campaign in Texas is now posted.
• Aug. 16, 2022: Jeff has been awarded tenure at Illinois, and promoted to the title of Associate Professor.
• Jul. 22, 2022: After completing pre-flight compatibility testing last week, SPIDER is packed and on its way to Antarctica! Many thanks to the team at CSBF for their extensive help and support.
• May 31, 2022: Pre-flight integration for SPIDER has begun at Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, TX! After a long pandemic hibernation, we're preparing SPIDER for an Antarctic launch in December.
• May 26, 2022: Elle Shaw gave a presentation on SPIDER to a distinguished audience at From Planck to the future of CMB, in Ferrara, Italy. Our team's first in-person conference talk since pre-pandemic!
• Mar. 29, 2022: Congratulations to Dr. Ben Osherson, our group's first Ph.D. graduate, on his successful defense!
• Feb. 26, 2022: We have taken our first TES load curves with full time-division SQUID multiplexing in our dilution fridge! After initial commissioning and training using an old SPIDER array, this will enable development and commissioning of hardware for CMB-S4 and Taurus.


• Oct. 14, 2021: Our group is featured in two department news articles: one on our lab's newly-constructed crane loft, intended for TIM cryostat operations, the other on the new Taurus balloon project.
• Oct. 4, 2021: The newest BICEP/Keck result ("BK18") has been published as a featured article in Physical Review Letters. This represents the strongest constraint on primordial gravitational waves to date: r<0.036 (95% CL).
• Sep. 1, 2021: Our group has been awarded new NASA funding to develop a new balloon-borne CMB instrument called Taurus, and to prepare for SPIDER's second flight.
• Jul. 23, 2021: Congratulations to Amber on passing her preliminary (candidacy) exam!
• Jul. 19, 2021: Jeff and Rong will be presenting posters this week at the 19th International Workshop on Low Temperature Detectors.
• Jul. 8, 2021: Our laboratory's new dilution refrigerator is operational, reaching a base temperature of 8.7 mK this morning. It will soon be engaged in development work for CMB-S4, Taurus, PICO, and beyond!
• Apr. 30, 2021: Congratulations to Elle, who has received the department's 2021 Errede award and been accepted to the college's Mavis Future Faculty program for next year.
• Apr. 23, 2021: Jeff was a featured speaker at this weekend's Art-Science Festival, speaking about ballooning in Antarctica.
• Mar. 24, 2021: Primary cosmological results from SPIDER's first flight have been posted to the arXiv!
• Mar. 16, 2021: Our group's new dilution refrigerator has arrived and awaits installation!


• Dec. 13, 2020: Elle has presented a poster and associated paper at SPIE 2020, on the design and performance of the SPIDER 280 GHz receivers.
• Sep. 2, 2020: Congratulations to Rong on passing his preliminary (candidacy) exam!
• Aug. 17, 2020: Congratulations to Ben on passing his preliminary (candidacy) exam!
• Jul. 15, 2020: Our group has been awarded new funding for our efforts on CMB-S4 (DOE) and to develop a new on-chip THz spectrometer for space applications (NASA).
• May 19, 2020: Jeff has been elected to the Governing Board of the CMB-S4 collaboration.
• May 7, 2020: Congratulations to Elle on passing her preliminary (candidacy) exam!
• Mar. 11, 2020: Rong has presented a poster at ISSTT 2020 on his work designing absorbers for TIM. An associated paper will be submitted to IEEE Transactions on THz Science and Technology.
• Feb. 16, 2020: Ben's LTD paper on the particle response of antenna-coupled TES arrays has been accepted to appear in JLTP, and been posted on the arXiv! Several other LTD papers for BICEP Array have also been accepted and posted.


• Dec. 16-19 2019: Jeff presented a talk on SPIDER and a poster on cosmic ray response at B-Mode from Space 2019 in Garching, Germany.
• Oct. 2-4, 2019: U. of Illinois hosted the inaugural meeting of the South Pole Observatory (SPO) collaboration, a joint effort between the BICEP/Keck and SPT collaborations to build the future of CMB research at the South Pole.
• Jul. 22-26 2019: Ben presented a talk at Low-Temperature Detectors 2019 in Milan, Italy. Riccardo and Jeff also attended.
• Apr. 19, 2019: Best wishes to our undergrad alums heading off to pursue Ph.D.s! In the fall Bryan will be attending Penn State, and Kaliroë will attend MIT.
• Feb. 28, 2019: The mission study report for PICO, a concept for a probe-class CMB satellite, has been submitted to NASA and posted to the arXiv.


• Dec. 20, 2018: Kick-off meeting at the University of Arizona for our newly-funded balloon project, TIM (STARFIRE)!
• May 29, 2018: Welcome to our 2018 REU student: Hannah Messenger, from CWRU.
• May 13, 2018: Congratulations to our class of 2018 graduates: Frank Fu, Derek Glennon, and Alex Navarre!
  Jeff was the faculty speaker at the 2018 Physics/Astronomy Convocation ceremony.
• May 1-3, 2018: Ben presented a poster on the cosmic ray response of TES arrays at the PICO (CMB probe) meeting.
• Apr. 4, 2018: Elle is a 2018 recipient of the Physics department's Scott Anderson Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award!
• Mar. 7, 2018: The last two SPIDER 280 GHz telescopes have shipped from UIUC to Princeton, where they will be integrated with the flight payload.
• Feb. 14, 2018: Jeff delivered the Physics Colloquium: "A View of the Dawn of Time from Above the Clouds".


• Dec. 15, 2017: Jeff has been named a Fellow of the U of I Center for Advanced Study for the 2018-19 academic year.
• Oct. 24, 2017: For Dark Matter Day at U of I, Jeff and colleagues hosted a screening of Seeing the Beginning of Time, followed by a panel discussion. About 150 people attended!
• Sep. 28, 2017: Our test cryostat is sub-Kelvin once again! We'll be characterizing the response of CMB detectors to particle radiation using Ben's "monotile" test jig.
• Sep. 22, 2017: Jeff was one of three hosts of Astronomy on Tap at Pygmalion 2017.
• Aug. 2, 2017: SPIDER's first scientific result from the 2015 flight has been published in the Astrophysical Journal: a new upper limit on the circular polarization of the CMB.
• Jul. 17-21, 2017: Jeff and Riccardo traveled to Kurume, Japan for Low-Temperature Detectors 2017, where they presented a poster on SPIDER and studies of cosmic ray response in CMB detectors.
• Mar. 23, 2017: Jeff gave an invited review talk on CMB observations at an Aspen Winter Conference: "From the LHC to Dark Matter and Beyond".


• Nov. 5, 2016: Professor Filippini delivered a public lecture, The Hidden Universe: Dark Matter and Dark Energy, as part of the Saturday Physics for Everyone series.
• Nov. 1, 2016: The SPIDER project has been renewed for a second flight in 2018! SPIDER is funded by NASA and by the Canadian Space Agency.
• Jun. 16, 2016: Professor Filippini hosted Astronomy on Tap Champaign-Urbana, giving a talk about dark matter at Pizza M.
• Feb. 2, 2016: The SPIDER test cryostat has arrived at U of I in preparation for SPIDER-2 receiver work.
• Jan. 20, 2016: The BICEP2/Keck 95+150 GHz paper has been published as an Editor's Choice in Physical Review Letters.


• Nov. 22, 2015: This Thanksgiving we give thanks that SPIDER has begun her long trip back to the States, thanks to heroic recovery efforts in Antarctica this week by Ed Young (Princeton Ph.D. student) and the British Antarctic Survey!
• Oct. 30, 2015: New results from Keck Array (95+150 GHz) and BICEP2 (150 GHz) set the most stringent limits to date on primordial gravitational waves. This is the first polarization-only constraint that surpasses that from the CMB temperature anisotropies: arXiv:1510.09217.
• Aug. 14, 2015: Our group has been awarded its first external research funding: a NASA Strategic Astrophysics Technology grant, in collaboration with Caltech/JPL!
• Mar. 9, 2015: The BICEP2/Keck Array/Planck joint analysis has been published as an Editor's Choice in Physical Review Letters.
• Feb. 4, 2015: SPIDER's data disks have been recovered from the ice by members of the British Antarctic Survey! Data analysis will shortly begin in earnest.
• Jan. 1-18, 2015: SPIDER has completed its first science flight over Antarctica! See story in Caltech News.