Latham Boyle

Latham Boyle was a CIFAR Junior Fellow in the Cosmology & Gravity program from December 1, 2008 to November 30, 2010.  During the first year of his Junior Fellowship, he was a postdoctoral fellow working under the supervision of CIFAR Fellow Lev Kofman at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto.  In January 2010, he became a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.  Latham obtained his undergraduate degree in Physics from Harvard University, and later spent a year at Caltech, supported by a Robert A. Millikan Fellowship.  He received his PhD in 2006 from the Princeton University Physics Department, where he was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.  His thesis advisor was Paul Steinhardt.  Latham then worked as a CITA Postdoctoral Fellow, prior to becoming a CIFAR Junior Fellow.

Dr. Boyle works on early universe cosmology – the scientific and mathematical study of how the universe began and what took place during the first moments after the Big Bang.  He has worked, in particular, on understanding the new clues that may be obtained from a variety of forthcoming experiments that will be sensitive to gravitational waves – observable ripples in spacetime predicted by our modern theory of gravity, Einstein’s General Relativity.  He also studies black holes.  Over the past few years, he has made progress on the problem of black hole coalescence: when two black holes merge to form a single black hole (as they often do in our universe!), how do the properties of the final black hole depend on those of the initial black holes?  He has also proposed a way to detect light rays which have been bent into “light loops” as they pass very near a black hole on their way to our telescopes.