2021
Physics Career Day 2021
10:30 am–6:00 pm Zoom
Virtual Memorial for Professor Emeritus Roger Hildebrand (1922-2021)
1:00–4:00 pm Zoom
PhD Thesis Defense: Nora Shipp
9:00–10:00 am
Nora Shipp, “Discovery & Modeling of Milky Way Stellar Streams”
KICP Colloquium: Manoj Kaplinghat (University of California, Irvine)
3:30–4:30 pm Zoom
Manoj Kaplinghat (University of California, Irvine) “Self-interacting dark matter”
KICP Seminar: Arianna Renzini (Caltech)
12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Arianna Renzini (Caltech) “Mapping Gravitational-Wave Backgrounds: Investigations in LIGO and Prospects for LISA”
CANCELLED - A&A Colloquium: Victoria Kaspi (McGill University)
3:30–4:30 pm Zoom
Fast Radio Bursts
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are few-millisecond bursts of radio waves coming from far outside the Milky Way. Their origin is presently unknown. Some FRBs are observed to exhibit repeat bursts, but it is presently unknown whether they represent a single class of object or multiple classes. Recently there has been tremendous observational progress on understanding FRBs thanks to the CHIME Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB). In this talk I review what is known about FRBs, and describe the lastest CHIME/FRB results.
KICP Seminar: Ben Thorne (UCSC)
12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Ben Thorne (UCSC) “A Bayesian Approach to CMB Lensing Reconstruction and Galactic Foreground Removal”
KICP Colloquium: Rebecca Leane (Stanford University)
4:00–5:00 pm Zoom
Rebecca Leane (Stanford University) “Dark Matter in Stars and Planets”
Tuesday Lunch Seminar: Jamie Law-Smith (University of California, Santa Cruz)
12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Interactions between black holes, stars, and galaxies
Jamie Law-Smith, University of California, Santa Cruz
A physical understanding of the high energy interactions between black holes, stars, and neutron stars, coupled with the context of their galactic birthplaces, will allow us to use these systems as tools to better understand black holes at all masses, the lives and deaths of stars, and the dynamics in galactic centers. In this talk, I will discuss one particular interaction: the tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole. I will present the STARS library of tidal disruption event simulations and will show that all our simulations can be reduced to a single relationship. I will present the chemical structure of the disks formed after tidal disruption—a key step in understanding the spectra of these events. I will also connect these AU-scale events to kpc-scale galaxy physics: I will present a systematic study of tidal disruption event host galaxies in the context of the local galaxy population, and in particular our finding that they are highly centrally concentrated. We expect ~50,000 tidal disruption events detected with LSST over 10 years, allowing us to use these events as unprecedented probes of supermassive black hole demographics, nuclear stellar populations, the physics of super-Eddington accretion, and dynamical mechanisms operating in galactic centers.
KICP Seminar: Jose Luis Bernal (Johns Hopkins University)
12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Jose Luis Bernal (Johns Hopkins University) “The trouble with H0 (and beyond)”