Name: Jaiyul Yoo
Current position: Faculty
Affiliation: University of Zürich
Field of research: Cosmology
What is your career trajectory to date?
Seoul - Ohio State - Harvard - Berkeley - Zürich.
What are the most exciting open questions in your research area?
Origin of the Universe.
What do you like and dislike about being a scientist?
Scientists' ability to reason and freedom to choose research topics. There is not much to dislike, but maybe we are all too focused all the time?
Which of your skills are you most proud of, or find most useful?
Analytical and numerical computational skills are always useful in many aspects.
In your career so far, at what point were you the most excited, and what were you excited about?
In general I get much excited when I find an answer to the question I have been thinking a lot. For example, when I understood the gauge-invariance of the cosmological observables, the lensing rotation in the presence of gravity waves is a coordinate artifact, the observed CMB temperature is not the background CMB temperature.
What new skills would you like to learn in the next year?
xAct + Mathematica.
What advances or new results are you excited about or looking forward to?
2nd order relativistic calculations of all the cosmological observables.
What is the biggest obstacle that is slowing down your research field right now?
In cosmology, we need a theoretical guidance beyond LCDM.
What role do you think a community network like EuCAPT can play in developing theoretical astroparticle physics and cosmology in Europe?
Network.
What’s your favorite food?
No strong preference.
Have you lived in a different European country than you do now? If so, would you like to tell us something about it, e.g. a fond memory or something you found surprising?
Only Switzerland in Europe.
How do you like to relax after a hard day of work?
Running or meditation, but mostly busy with family.
Do you have any non-physics interests that you would like to share?
These days I spend a lot of time learning hoch Deutsch. A new language is not for a busy scientist, unfortunately.
If you were not a scientist, what do you think you would be doing?
Programming.
What do you hope to see accomplished scientifically in the next 50 years?
I believe that low energy gravity is GR, but there exist many strange aspects in LCDM. Falsify LCDM, maybe?