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James Gurian

James Gurian — Mr — Faculty
Office: 440 Whitmore Laboratory
Address: Davey Lab
jhg5248@psu.edu
James Gurian
Astronomy Black Holes Dark Matter Gravitational Waves IGC

I am a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, advised by Dr. Donghui Jeong. I am interested in using gravitational waves at frequencies from H0 (CMB) to Hz (LIGO) to address cosmological questions. Most of my work is related to the observation that if (some of) the dark matter can cool efficiently, it will form compact objects whose mergers may be accessible to LIGO.

Publications
  1. Michael Ryan, James Gurian, Sarah Shandera, Donghui Jeong “Molecular Chemistry for Dark Matter.” (2021) doi:10.48550/ARXIV.2106.13245
  2. James Gurian, Donghui Jeong, Michael Ryan, Sarah Shandera “Molecular Chemistry for Dark Matter II: Recombination, Molecule Formation, and Halo Mass Function in Atomic Dark Matter.” (2021) doi:10.48550/ARXIV.2110.11964
  3. James Gurian, Donghui Jeong, Jai-chan Hwang, Hyerim Noh “Gauge-invariant tensor perturbations induced from baryon-CDM relative velocity and the B-mode polarization of the CMB.” Phys. Rev. D 104 (2021) doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.104.083534
  4. Craig Copi, James Gurian, Arthur Kosowsky, Glenn Starkman, Hezi Zhang “Exploring suppressed long-distance correlations as the cause of suppressed large-angle correlations.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 490 4 (2019) doi:10.1093/mnras/stz2962

James Gurian's research group

Name Role Affiliations Email Phone Office Centers Research topics
John Blakely John Blakely Undergraduate Student Astronomy, Physics jpb6799@psu.edu +1 814 865 0410 Osmond Laboratory CTOC, IGC Black Holes, Dark Matter
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.