Professor and Associate Chair for Graduate Program
3247 Homer A. Neal Lab
phone: 734.615.3289
About
Professor Huterer’s research is in cosmology, at the interface of theory and data. Huterer uses measurements from telescopes on ground and in space in order to better understand the makeup of the universe, as well as its past, present, and future evolution. This includes effort to better understand “dark energy,” a mysterious component that dominates the dynamics of the universe and causes its accelerated expansion. The physical mechanism behind dark energy is one of the great unsolved mysteries of modern physics and astronomy. Professor Huterer is studying how to use various cosmological probes to better understand its nature.
Professor Huterer has been actively involved in analyzing and interpreting data from the Dark Energy Survey, on which he previously served as a coordinator of the Theory and Combined Probes working group. His current focus is work with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, where he co-leads the effort to turn measurements of millions of galaxy positions into constraints on dark matter and dark energy. The cosmological results from the 1st year of the DESI data, released in April 2024, provided unprecedented constraints on dark energy and neutrino mass and were reported and followed up worldwide (including at UM).
Professor Huterer is also actively involved in studying the isotropy of the universe and the distribution of primordial inhomogeneities that seeded structures observed in the sky today. In 2008, he and his collaborators discovered a novel signature of departures from Gaussianity in the initial distribution of matter in the universe that can be observed in the spatial distribution of galaxies in current and future surveys. This finding energized the efforts to use the distribution of galaxies to test early-universe physics.
Professor Huterer has recently published a new textbook on cosmology, “A Course in Cosmology: From Theory to Practice.” The textbook specifically aims to teach cosmology at an introductory graduate or advanced undergraduate level. The textbook's aims are to be 1) pedagogical, 2) up-to-date vis-a-vis developments in the field, and 3) computation-friendly.
Selected Publications
DESI 2024 VI: Cosmological Constraints from the Measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (DESI collaboration), arXiv: 2404.03002
Evidence for Suppression of Structure Growth in the Concordance Cosmological Model (M. Nguyen, D. Huterer and Y. Wen), Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 111011 (2023)
Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing, (T.M.C. Abbott et al, DES collaboration), Phys. Rev. D 105, 023520 (2022).
Constraints on dark matter to dark radiation conversion in the late universe with DES-Y1 and external data (A. Chen, D. Huterer et al, DES collaboration), Phys. Rev. D 123, 123528 (2021).
A Test of the Standard Cosmological Model with Geometry and Growth, (U. Andrade, D. Anbajagane, R. von Marttens, D. Huterer and J. Alcaniz), JCAP 11, 014 (2021).
Dark Energy Two Decades After: Observables, Probes, Consistency Tests, (D. Huterer and D.L. Shafer), Rep. Prog. Phys. 81, 016901 (2018).
Sample Variance in the Local Measurements of the Hubble Constant, (H.-Y. Wu and D. Huterer), MNRAS 471, 4946 (2017).
Dipoles in the Sky, (C. Gibelyou and D. Huterer), MNRAS 427, 1994 (2012).
The Imprints of Primordial Non-Gaussianities on Large-Scale Structure: Scale Dependent Bias and Abundance of Virialized Objects, (N. Dalal, O. Doré, D. Huterer and A. Shirokov), Phys. Rev. D 77, 123514 (2008).
Field(s) of Study
