High Energy Theory Seminar: "SYK, harmonic analysis, and multipoint conformal blocks"
Vladimir Rosenhaus, IAS, Princeton University
Condensed Matter Seminar: "Soft complexity in gels: network connectivity, viscoelasticity and failure"
Emanuela Del Gado, Georgetown University
Soft matter (colloids, polymers, proteins…) often self-assembles into gels with diverse structure and mechanics, ubiquitous in nature and extensively used to improve diverse industrial products, where they provide…
Astronomy seminar: "Using the environment to infer supernova progenitor properties"
Lluis Galbany, University of Pittsburgh
Integral Field Spectroscopy (IFS) applied to supernova (SN) environmental studies have shown the potential of this technique to directly characterize the galactic environmental parameters at SN locations, compare…
High Energy Theory Seminar: "Gauge-field inflation and the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry"
Peter Adshead, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
In this talk, I describe a new class of inflationary scenarios which utilize gauge fields to generate inflationary dynamics in the early universe. Beyond simply providing yet another model for inflation, these…
Dissertation Defense: "Measuring Photometric Properties of SDSS and MaNGA Galaxies
Johanna-Laina Fischer
Experimental Partical Physics Seminar: "First results from the PROSPECT reactor neutrino experiment"
Danielle Norcini, Yale University
Experiments at nuclear reactors have played a key role in determining the properties of the weakly-interacting neutrinos. Results from recent reactor experiments suggest a disagreement between the observed…
Rittenhouse Lecture: "The Planck Legacy: Inflation and the Origin of Structure in the Universe"
George P. Efstathiou, University of Cambridge and Kavli Institute for Cosmology
I will review the latest results on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies measured by the Planck satellite. These measurements agree extremely well with a spatially flat, cosmological constant dominated…
High Energy Theory Seminar: "Newman-Penrose and BMS Charges Near Null Infinity"
Chris Pope, Texas A&M University
In 1965 Newman and Penrose (NP) showed that any asymptotically-flat spacetime admits 10 quantities, obtained as certain spherical-harmonic projections of a particular component of the Weyl tensor, which are exactly…
High Energy Theory Seminar: "Black Hole Microstate Cosmology"
Brian Swingle, University of Maryland, College Park
I will discuss the possibility that certain high-energy holographic CFT states correspond to black hole microstates with a geometrical behind-the-horizon region, modelled by a portion of a second asymptotic region…