The Joy of Ex-perimental Astrophysics with UCSB Professor Ben Mazin (#172)

Benjamin Mazin is the Worster Chair in Experimental Physics at UC
Santa Barbara. He attended Yale University, graduating in
1997.  He then attended the California Institute of
Technology, graduating with a doctorate in Astrophysics in August,
2004.  After a short post-doc at Caltech, he went to work
as a scientist at JPL in March, 2005.  He joined the
faculty at the University of California Santa Barbara in September,
2008, where he leads a lab dedicated to the development of
optical/UV/X-ray Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) and
astronomical instrumentation for time and energy resolved
studies.  His current research focus is building and
using MKID-based instruments for detecting and characterizing
nearby exoplanets.  He was awarded the Presidential
Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in
2010, and the Worster Chair in Experimental Physics in
2017.Ben Mazin, is a part of the Department of
Physics at UCSB.  We are focused on using a
unique detector technology called Microwave Kinetic Inductance
Detectors (MKIDs) for astronomy in the near infrared, optical,
ultraviolet, and X-ray. MKIDs allow us to determine the energy and
arrival time of individual photons without read noise or dark
current. The applications of this technology spans a wide range of
vital research areas, including detecting Earth-like planets around
nearby stars, untangling the emission mechanisms of pulsars,
determining the redshift of billions of galaxies, and detecting
dark matter. https://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~bmazin/index.html Thanks
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