About

An experimental physicist, Tony Tyson is Distinguished Professor of Physics at University of California, Davis.  Before that, he worked at Bell Labs in the physics division. While applying CCDs to astronomy in the early 1980’s he discovered a population of faint blue galaxies, and then pioneered the field of weak gravitational lensing using these distant galaxies as sources. Dark Energy was discovered using one of his wide field CCD cameras.  His current research is in cosmology: dark matter distribution, gravitational lens effects, cosmic shear, the nature of dark energy, laboratory search for hidden photon dark matter, and microwave and optical instrumentation for weak signal detection.  He has led an international effort to build a new kind of telescope/camera, now in construction in northern Chile. He is currently the Rubin Observatory Chief Scientist.

Short CV

J. ANTHONY TYSON 

EDUCATION

Stanford University, B.S., Physics, 1962.
University of Wisconsin, Ph.D., Physics, 1967.
Univ. of Chicago, 1967-1969, Postdoctoral Fellow.   

POSITIONS

1963-1967       Univ. of Wisconsin, Research Assistant.
1964-1967       Univ. of Chicago, Institute for the Study of Metals, Research Assistant.
1967-1969       Univ. of Chicago, James Franck Institute,  Postdoctoral Fellow.
1969-1985       AT&T Bell Laboratories, Member of the Technical Staff (MTS).
1985-2003       Bell Laboratories, Distinguished MTS.
2003-              Distinguished  Professor, University of California, Davis.
2003-2013      Founding Director, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project
2013-              Rubin Observatory LSST Chief Scientist

HONORS

Gravity Research Foundation Essay Award, 1970.
IR100 Award, Industrial Research, 1985.
Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff Award, AT&T Bell Labs, 1985.
Fellow, American Physical Society, 1994.
Aaronson Memorial Prize, 1996
Elected Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1997
Elected to National Academy of Sciences, 1997
Scott Lectures, Cambridge Univ., 1998
Honorary D.Sc., Univ. of Chicago, 1998
APS Centennial Speaker, 1999
Elected to American Philosophical Society, 2000
Hintze Lecture,  Oxford Univ., 2012
Smithsonian NASM Permanent Cosmology Exhibit, 2018

 

PUBLICATIONS

Selected publications in cosmology: 

Null Search for Bursts of Gravitational Radiation , J.A. Tyson, Phys. Rev. Lett.,  31 , 326 (1973)

Alignment of Faint Galaxy Images: Cosmological Distortion and Rotation, F. Valdes, J.A. Tyson, and J.F. Jarvis, Astrophys. J., 271, 431 (1983).

Galaxy Mass Distribution from Gravitational Light Deflection,  J.A. Tyson, F. Valdes, J.F. Jarvis, and A.P. Mills, Astrophys. J. Lett.,,  281, L59 (1984).

Deep CCD Survey: Galaxy Luminosity and Color Evolution, Tyson, J.A.,   Astron. J. ,  96 , 1 (1988).

A Redshift Limit for the Faint Blue Galaxy Population from Deep U Band Imaging, Guhathakurta, P., Tyson, J.A., and Majewski, S.,  Astrophys. J. Lett. ,  357 , L9 (1990).

Detection of Systematic Gravitational Lens Galaxy Image Alignments: Mapping Dark Matter in Galaxy Clusters, Tyson, J.A., Valdes, F., and Wenk, R.A., Astrophys. J. Lett. ,  349, 1 (1990).

Measurement of the Mass Profile of Abell 1689,  J.A. Tyson and P. Fischer,  Astrophys J. Lett, 446 , L55 (1995).

Galaxy Dark Matter: Galaxy-Galaxy Lensing in the Hubble Deep Field, I. Dell'Antonio  and J.A. Tyson, Astrophys. J. 473, L17 (1996).

Detailed Mass Map of CL0024+1654 from Strong Lensing, J.A. Tyson, G.P. Kochanski, and I. Dell'Antonio,  Astrophys. J.,  498, L107 (1998).

Detection of weak gravitational lens distortions of distant galaxies by cosmic dark matter at large scales, D. Wittman, J.A. Tyson, D. Kirkman, I.P.Dell’Antonio, and G.M. Bernstein, Nature,  405, 143 (2000) 

Distance, Growth Factor, and Dark Energy Constraints from Photometric Baryon Acoustic Oscillation and Weak Lensing Measurements, Zhan, H., Knox, L., and Tyson, J.A.  Astrophys. J.  690, 923 (2009).

Galaxy-Mass Correlations on 10 Mpc Scales in the Deep Lens Survey,  A. Choi, J. A. Tyson, C. B. Morrison, M. J. Jee, S. J. Schmidt, V. E. Margoniner, D. M. Wittman,  Astrophys. J.  759, 101 (2012)

Cosmic Shear Results from the Deep Lens Survey – I: Joint constraints on Ω_m  and σ₈ with a Two-Dimensional Analysis, M.J. Jee, J.A. Tyson, M.D. Schneider, D. Wittman, S. Schmidt, S. Hilbert.  Astrophys. J.  765, 74 (2013)

Cosmology with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope: an Overview,  H. Zhan, H., and J.A. Tyson,  Rept. Prog. Phys. 81 (2018) no.6, 066901 (2018) 

Sky subtraction in an era of low surface brightness astronomy, Lee S Kelvin, Imran Hasan, J Anthony Tyson, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 520, Issue 2, Pages 2484–2516 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad180