Fernando Atrio

Stay at the IAC: 19/10/2012 to 20/11/2012.

Research line: Cosmology and Astroparticles

Currently Dr. Atrio is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Universitity of Salamanca (Spain).

Former PhD student of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, he obtained his PhD in 1991 by the University of La Laguna. From 1992-95 he was a post-doc at the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the University of California at Berkely before being appointed Associate Professor at the University of Salamanca in 1996.

His main field of research is Cosmology and Large Scale Structure. He is member of the Planck Collaboration and the Euclid Consortium. His research interests are the analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background secondary anisotropies generated by clusters, the search of missing baryons through the detection of the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium contribution to CMB temperature anisotropies and models of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. He is the author of more than 100 refereed papers with close to 4000 citations.

During his visit to the IAC Dr. Atrio he has worked in collaboration with Ricardo Génova-Santos, and also with Jan Muecket and Francisco Kitaura of the IAP/Potsdam, in a project focused in the detection of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect signal produced by the warm/hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) in Planck data. Preliminary results indicate tentative evidence for this signal, when Planck maps are correlated with templates built from the 2MASS survey which trace the WHIM spatial distribution. Analyses to confirm this signal are ongoing. A paper with these results will be written, either claiming a detection or placing upper limits on the sought signal, which should be submitted for publication in the near future.