McDonald Institute

Dynamical dark energy and the week that broke cosmology | PI News By Katherine Mack In 2025, DESI caused a stir by suggesting that dark energy is evolving. Katie Mack, Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at Perimeter, walks us through the hubbub, the history, and what comes next. August 20, 2026 Katie Mack, Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science C...

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in this year's McDonald Institute Annual Community Meeting on July 27-29. This photo was taken on the last day, so is missing quite a few people who had to leave early. Thanks also to the members of our community who participated remotely!

A few pictures of yesterday's solar eclipse, taken by McDonald Institute Education and Public Outreach Officer Nik Arora. Nik was heavily involved in coordinating the Queen's University outreach events for the total solar eclipse in 2024. This eclipse coincides with the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, and a solar eclipse means a new moon, making for an especially dark sky tonight for optimal viewing of the annual Perseids. Enjoy!

The Astroparticle Physics Card Game is out in the wild! Head on over to Improbable Escapes in the Gardiners Town Centre in Kingston and pick up a free deck! Let us know when you do; we want to see who you got!

Wonderground | SNOLAB The SNOLAB education team is excited to be bringing the questions of Canadian students in grades 4-8 into our deep underground lab space! Wonderground, formerly called SEEDLING…

Join us this afternoon at 3:30 PM ET on YouTube for this month's HQP Seminar, from Ben Davis-Purcell (TRIUMF), who will be talking about his experience working as an NSERC Policy Analyst! A bit of a departure from our regular astroparticle physics seminars, but it should be of interest to many working in research in Canada.
https://www.youtube.com//streams

Rounding out the scientific presentations from the final day of the McDonald Institute Annual Meeting Yesterday was Jessie Thwaites (Queen’s), Jakub Stacho (SFU) and Bryan Owen’s (Queen’s) on the IceCube and P-One neutrino telescopes, as well as Connor McGrath (Queen’s) on the ballon-borne HELIX experiment, Abo-bakr Emara (University of Windsor) on the development of a radon assaying facility. And finally, Fabrice Retiere (TRIUMF) shared about his technology transfer Journey, using devices developed for physics research to develop an air quality analyzer.

Some fantastic Theoretical Astroparticle Physics talks from Han Wu (Queen's University) on Dark Matter–Induced UV Radiation and the Formation of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds, Andrew Buchanan (Queen’s) who is looking for evidence of dark matter in mica, and Udaykaran Madaan (TRIUMF) on the latest developments in Silicon Photomultipliers used in Dark Matter Detectors

The final day of the McDonald Institute 2026 Annual Meeting is underway with Astroparticle Physics talks from Ryan Plestid (CERN) on Quantum sensing for light dark matter direct detection, Matthew Stukel (SNOLAB) who talked about his physics career journey and his research in cryogenic rare event detectors, and Vijay Iyer on his work in developing quantum qubits at SNOLAB.