King's Fellow receives award for cosmology paper

King's Fellow Anne Davis and her co-authors have been awarded 2nd prize in the Buchalter Cosmology Prize for their work entitled A Minimal Axio-dilaton Dark Sector, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics and recognised by the judging panel as “a new and remarkable model of how two interacting fields—the axion and the dilaton—could constitute the entire dark sector of the Universe, providing a simple, common origin for dark matter and dark energy with distinctive observational signatures, which if found, would provide a testable alternative to the standard cosmological model.”

On receiving the award, Professor Davis said: 

Our paper shows that the entire ‘dark Universe’ could arise from a common origin. It is an intriguing result which could have a profound effect and observational consequences. The research and, of course, winning a prize would not have been possible without my wonderful collaborators. 

More about her work on the direct detection of dark energy can be found on the University website.

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The Buchalter Cosmology Prize, created by Dr Ari Buchalter in 2014, seeks to reward new ideas or discoveries that have the potential to produce a breakthrough advance in our understanding of the origin, structure, and evolution of the universe. A former astrophysicist turned entrepreneur, Dr Buchalter was inspired to create the prize based on his own research and experience in cosmology, and the belief that fundamental breakthroughs in the field of cosmology may be near at hand, but will require new thinking and approaches that extend beyond current models and techniques. 

The rotating judging panel for the prize is comprised of leading theoretical physicists noted for their work in cosmology.