Congratulations!
The $10,000 First Prize was awarded to Dr. Kyle Boone (former DiRAC Fellow, presently at Google Inc.) and Dr. Matthew McQuinn (Professor of Astronomy at the University of Washington), for their work entitled “Solar System-scale interferometry on fast radio bursts could measure cosmic distances with sub-percent precision”.
Last year (in 2023), Kyle and Matt devised a new method for measuring cosmological distances to fast radio bursts using the differences in wavefront arrival times as measured by extremely long baseline interferometry. The technique requires spacecrafts floating at the opposing ends of the Solar System and thus years away. But someday, a system like they describe will yield unprecedentedly accurate, sub-percent, constraints on cosmological parameters and also a new, independent way, to measure the Hubble constant.
The Buchalter Cosmology Prize seeks to stimulate ground-breaking theoretical, observational, or experimental work in cosmology that has the potential to produce a breakthrough advance in our understanding. It was created to support the development of new theories, observations, or methods, that can help illuminate the puzzle of cosmic expansion from first principles.