2019
KICP and A&A Jamboree & Fall Harvest Festival
1:00–7:00 pm ERC 401, ERC Atrium
Simpson Lecture - Alan Watson, University of Leeds
4:00–5:00 pm MCP 201
2nd Annual John A Simpson Lecture: Alan Watson, University of Leeds, “The Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays – present status and future prospects”
A&A Cookies, Coffee and Conversation
2:30–3:30 pm Hubble Lounge (ERC 501)
KICP Seminar - Carl Rodriguez, Harvard
12:00–1:00 pm ERC 401
Carl Rodriguez, Harvard, “How Do You Form a Binary Black Hole?”
KICP colloquium - Brian Nord
3:30 pm ERC 161
Brian Nord, Fermilab and UChicago, “AI In the Sky: Implications and Challenges for the use of Artificial Intelligence in Astrophysics and in Society”
Milky Way Discussion Group: Nora Shipp
2:00–3:00 pm ERC 419
Chalk Talk: Charles Steinhardt (Neils Bohr Institute/DAWN) & Evgeni Grishin (Technion)
12:00–1:00 pm Hubble Lounge
Charles Steinhardt (Niels Bohr Institute / DAWN): “Thermal Regulation and the Star-Forming Main Sequence.”
&
Evgeni Grishin (Technion)
“Capturing planetesimals in gaseous disks”
Special Physics Colloquium: Jeff McMahon (Michigan)
3:30–4:30 pm Maria Goeppert-Mayer Lecture Hall (KPTC 106)
A&A Cookies, Coffee and Conversation
2:30–3:30 pm Hubble Lounge (ERC 501)
Open Group Seminar: Humna Awan (Rutgers)
1:30–2:30 pm ERC 445
“Probing LSS with Large Galaxy Surveys: Systematics and Estimators”
Studying cosmology with large galaxy surveys requires an unprecedented understanding and mitigation of systematics—a challenge that can be addressed on two fronts: quantification of the impacts of systematics, and new tools to mitigate them. Addressing the first, I will discuss work on the artifacts induced by the observing strategy for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and present large dithers as an effective mechanism to mitigate the induced artifacts (Awan et al. 2016, ApJ, 829, 50)—a result that has now been adopted for the LSST observing strategy. I will also quantify the impacts of Milky Way dust on Large-Scale Structure (LSS) studies and the resulting cosmological parameter estimation. As for new tools, I will present a galaxy angular correlation function estimator that corrects for sample contamination arising from photometric-redshift estimation (Awan & Gawiser, 2019, submitted to ApJ); our framework allows for optimization of the estimator to improve the precision of cosmological parameter estimation. While these techniques are motivated by preparations for LSST, they are applicable to DES, DESI, HETDEX, Euclid, and WFIRST.