CoDEX

In 2020, I was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the project CoDEX: The Final 21-cm Cosmology Frontier. The project aims to detect the extremely faint radio signal from neutral hydrogen from the first billion years of the Universe, using the redshifted 21-cm line as a probe of the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization.

CoDEX brings together observational programmes with LOFAR and NenuFAR, analysis methods, and technical expertise in a single effort to improve current constraints on the 21-cm power spectrum by several orders of magnitude. The project combines advances in data processing, signal extraction, calibration, and computing infrastructure needed to handle the very large data volumes produced by modern low-frequency radio observations.

The ERC grant was awarded with a budget of €3.5 million, of which €1 million was dedicated to a new computing system for data processing and storage. This has helped strengthen the long-term data and computing capacity needed for precision 21-cm cosmology at Groningen.