Ask Duke cosmologist Eve Vavagiakis what she does for a living, and her answer is deceptively humble: “I work on the guts of cameras, basically.”
But the cameras she works on are designed for a special purpose: to take pictures of some of the oldest light in the universe.
In her office on Duke’s West Campus, the newly arrived assistant professor of Physics showed off a snapshot of this ancient light, the faint glow left over from the Big Bang that gave birth to the cosmos more than 13 billion years ago.
As she described it, “It’s essentially a baby picture of the universe.”
This afterglow is called the cosmic microwave background, and it contains clues about how the early universe looked and how it has evolved over time.
Because this remnant light is in the microwave part of the energy spectrum, we can’t see it with our eyes. But it’s all around us, and scientists can measure it using cameras equipped with sensitive detectors.
Vavagiakis is working on the cameras for a suite of new telescopes that will map tiny variations in the temperature of this light in unprecedented detail.
Last spring she traveled to one of these sites to help install electronics in the telescopes at the Simons Observatory, currently under construction in Chile's Atacama Desert.
Located at 17,000 feet above sea level on the barren slope of on an extinct volcano, she remarked that it was like being on the set of “Dune.”
The thin dry air there means less water vapor to block the signal, which is good for their measurements, but not so good for breathing.
“I didn’t know how I’d fare there because of my asthma,” Vavagiakis said.
To work at such high altitude, researchers must pass an extensive medical exam and wear a portable device that delivers oxygen via a nose tube.
“It's a very intense environment,” Vavagiakis said. “It's hard to think. You're wearing all this heavy gear. You have to cover your skin, you need to avoid the wind, and then you're working on all this sensitive equipment.”
“But it’s also incredibly beautiful,” she added. “Especially the sunsets as you're coming down off the mountain.” And to her surprise, she thrived despite the altitude. “The exhaustion is just part of the experience,” she said.
Vavagiakis knew she was interested in astronomy ever since she was a kid. “I’ve always thought space was cool,” she said.
She grew up in New York State, in the hilly suburbs some 20 miles north of Manhattan.
As a child she did a lot of STEM activities — attending space camp, launching rockets, competing in Science and Math Olympiads — but she was also “on the creative side,” she said.
She recalls a jewelry making class she taught at her local library as a teenager, weaving and braiding nylon thread into bracelets. “It turns out those skills translate well to working with wires and cables” inside camera devices, she said.
Vavagiakis said one of her concerns when she first went into physics, as an undergraduate, was whether it would put her on a path to becoming “a crotchety scientist working long hours alone in the lab.”
“I'm a people person,” she explained.
But studying the universe soon proved anything but isolating. “I get so much joy from plugging into efforts involving hundreds of people across the world to pursue some of the biggest questions humankind has ever asked,” she said.
She majored in physics and astronomy at Cornell, where in 2021 she also earned a Ph.D. in physics and continued her research as a postdoctoral fellow.
The cameras she builds are too big to wrap your arms around — imagine hugging a giant Pringles can with an 18-foot rim.
They rely on highly sensitive superconducting detectors that must be cooled to very low temperatures — minus 273 degrees Celsius, or a fraction of a degree above absolute zero — to shield the faint heat signals they’re trying to detect from other sources of radiation.
The mundane technical challenges involved in assembling the cooling equipment or writing code for analyses can seem far-flung from the grandeur she feels in the Atacama.
“Some days you have to spend hours dealing with a plumbing issue, or a bug in some code,” Vavagiakis said. “There is a level of nitty gritty that is really not very glamorous.”
But then she recalls hiking to the top of the mountain where the Simons Observatory was located. From there, she could just make out the future location of an even higher (18,400 feet) observatory, CCAT, where two cameras she designed will be installed on the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope, soon to be one of the highest telescopes in the world.
“We are starting to be able to use tools to understand the content of our universe in a way that we've never been able to do before,” Vavagiakis said. “It's incredibly inspiring and humbling.”
Once observations start next year, she’ll use the data to measure the effects of gravity and dark energy on the structure of the universe, and test ideas about how galaxies are formed over time.
In the meantime, she’s eager to start testing some of the superconducting detectors she and her collaborators have developed. Once her lab is up and running it will house a special refrigerator that will let her team conduct tests right on campus, at temperatures colder than outer space.
“We are developing new technologies that are simple to manufacture, that are simple to read out, that will enable an upscaling of the number of detectors we can put on the sky to make better and better images,” she said.
Vavagiakis is also the author of three children's books about astronomy and physics published by MIT Kids Press, titled “I'm a Neutrino,” “I'm a Black Hole,” and “I’m a Photon.”
When she’s not teaching or working in the lab, she enjoys hiking and cycling. Just before moving to Durham in July, Vavagiakis logged her final segment of the 580-mile Finger Lakes Trail, which stretches across New York State from the Pennsylvania border to the Catskills.
She lives in north Durham near the Eno River. “I can walk from my back door to the Mountains-to-Sea Trail,” she said. “I can’t wait to explore.”
Department of Physics