After receiving in June 1998 theAbitur from the Leibniz-Gymnasium inAltdorf bei Nürnberg, Raphael Flauger entered in July 1998 the German Air Force for his compulsory military service. In October 1998 he enrolled in a long-distance education program in mechanical engineering offered byTU Dresden. After the completion of his military service in April 1999, he enrolled in the physics program at theUniversity of Würzburg. There he received theVordiplom in August 2000. He continued to study physics at the University of Würzburg until July 2001. In 2001 he joined the Weinberg Theory Group at theUniversity of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). There in August 2002, he receive an M.A. in physics under the supervision of Sonia Paban. In autumn 2002, Flauger matriculated atImperial College London. There in September 2003, he received an M.S in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces under the supervision ofArkady Tseytlin. After received his M.S., Flauger returned, as a Ph.D. student, to study with the Weinberg Theory Group at UT Austin. From January to August, he was a Graduate Fellow at theKavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP). In August 2009 at UT Austin, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitledConstraining Fundamental Physics with Cosmology. His doctor supervisor wasSteven Weinberg. In addition to Weinberg, Flauger's doctoral committee consisted of Arno Bohm,Willy Fischler,Dan Freed, and Sonia Paban.[1]
In 2014, Flauger played a key role in criticizing and refuting the then sensational claims of theBICEP2 collaboration (2nd generation of Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization project) to have foundgravitational waves and evidence ofinflation in the CMB (even before the analysis of the Planck telescope team). At that time (2013–2014) he was at theInstitute for Advanced Study.[6][2] He was the lead author of an article, published in May 2014, indicating that polarized emission from interstellar dust could explain the findings of the BICEP2 science team.[7][8]
As a doctoral student of Weinberg at UT Austin, Flauger had predicted the B-modes in the CMB as an indication of gravitational waves that the BICEP2 science team thought they had found.[9][10] Flauger then worked on phenomenological string theory models that predict observably large B-modes, whereas previously it was generally assumed that such B-modes would not be predicted in string theory models because the associated energies are close to theGUT scale. According to Flauger and colleagues, this also opened up the possibility of testing string theory with CMB data. For example, he searched withEva Silverstein and Liam McAllister foraxion signals in the CMB, which are predicted by some string theories.
Caceres, Elena; Flauger, Raphael; Wrase, Timm (2009). "Hagedorn Systems from Backreacted Finite Temperature N_f=2N_c Backgrounds".arxiv.org.arXiv:0908.4483.
Clough, Katy; Lim, Eugene A.; Dinunno, Brandon S.; Fischler, Willy; Flauger, Raphael; Paban, Sonia (2017). "Robustness of inflation to inhomogeneous initial conditions".Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (9): 025.arXiv:1608.04408.Bibcode:2017JCAP...09..025C.doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2017/09/025.
Baumann, Daniel; Beutler, Florian; Flauger, Raphael; Green, Daniel; Slosar, Anže; Vargas-Magaña, Mariana; Wallisch, Benjamin; Yèche, Christophe (2019). "First constraint on the neutrino-induced phase shift in the spectrum of baryon acoustic oscillations".Nature Physics.15 (5):465–469.arXiv:1803.10741.Bibcode:2019NatPh..15..465B.doi:10.1038/s41567-019-0435-6. 2020
Elvis, Martin; et al. (2020). "The Case for Probe-class NASA Astrophysics Missions".Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society.51 (7): 140.arXiv:2002.12739.Bibcode:2019BAAS...51g.140E.
Flauger, Raphael; Gorbenko, Victor; Joyce, Austin; McAllister, Liam; Shiu, Gary; Silverstein, Eva (2022). "Snowmass White Paper: Cosmology at the Theory Frontier".arxiv.org.arXiv:2203.07629.
Elley, Matthew; Aurrekoetxea, Josu C.; Clough, Katy; Flauger, Raphael; Giannadakis, Panagiotis; Lim, Eugene A. (2025). "Robustness of inflation to kinetic inhomogeneities".Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics: 050.arXiv:2405.03490.doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2025/01/050.
