KICP Seminars & Colloquia, Current and Future
Today's Seminar
Upcoming Seminars

Seminar schedule for Current (Summer 2018) & Future Quarters
June 29, 2018
Friday noon seminar		Jo Bovy
The University of Toronto		Mapping the Milky Way in 6D with Gaia   [Abstract]
July 5, 2018
Open Group seminar		Sebastian Bruggisser
DESY		Electroweak Baryogenesis through varying Yukawas in Composite Higgs models   [Abstract]
July 9, 2018
Astronomy Special Seminar		Vasiliki Pavlidou
University of Crete		The Drunken Trek of Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays Through The Magnetic Field of the Milky Way   [Abstract]
July 18, 2018
Special seminar
cancelled		Rachel Rosen
Columbia University		Black Holes for Massive Gravitons   [Abstract]
July 26, 2018
Open Group seminar		Santiago Casas
CEA Paris-Saclay		Dark Energy with Euclid   [Abstract]
August 15, 2018
Special seminar		Marius Millea
IAP		Optimal CMB Lensing Reconstruction and Improved Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves   [Abstract]
September 17, 2018
Open Group seminar		Matt Lewandowski
IPhT		Analytic IR-resummation for the BAO peak   [Abstract]
September 21, 2018
Special seminar		Robert Kirshner
Clowes Research Professor of Science, Harvard University Chief Program Officer for Science, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation		From the Accelerating Universe to Accelerating Science   [Abstract]
October 3, 2018
Wednesday colloquium		Silvia Galli
IAP		Cosmological results from the legacy data release of the Planck satellite
October 10, 2018
Wednesday colloquium		Brian Keating
UC San Diego		Fundamental Physics with the Simons Observatory   [Abstract]
October 12, 2018
Friday noon seminar		Simeon Bird
UC Riverside		Cosmology with Neutral Hydrogen Absorbers
October 17, 2018
Astronomy Colloquium		Jay Strader
Michigan State University		TBA
October 19, 2018
Friday noon seminar		Sara M. Simon
University of Michigan		Precision Cosmology with the Cosmic Microwave Background from Chile   [Abstract]
October 24, 2018
Astronomy Colloquium		Keith Hawkins
TBA
October 31, 2018
Astronomy Colloquium		Jonathan Lunine
Cornell University		Juno's Hunt for Jovian Deep Oxygen, and the Implications for Giant Planet Formation   [Abstract]
November 7, 2018
Wednesday colloquium		Stephon S Alexander
Brown University		TBA
November 14, 2018
Astronomy Colloquium		Jennifer Yee
Harvard University		TBA
November 16, 2018
Friday noon seminar		Lina Necib
Caltech		Empirical Determination of the Local Velocity Distribution of Dark Matter
November 28, 2018
Astronomy Colloquium		Joe Hennawi
University of California - Santa Barbara		TBA
November 30, 2018
Friday noon seminar		Surjeet Rajendran
UC Berkeley		Low Energy Probes of Particle Physics
December 7, 2018
Friday noon seminar		Kimberly Boddy
Johns Hopkins University		Searching for Dark Matter Interactions in Cosmology
January 16, 2019
Astronomy Colloquium
TBA
January 30, 2019
Astronomy Colloquium		Ian Crossfield
MIT		TBA
February 13, 2019
Astronomy Colloquium		Roger Blandford
Stanford University		TBA
February 27, 2019
Astronomy Colloquium		Mansi Kasliwal
Caltech		TBA
March 13, 2019
Astronomy Colloquium		Mark Vogelsberger
MIT		TBA
 
COLLOQUIA
KICP Colloquia and Astronomy & Astrophysics Colloquia: Unless otherwise noted, all talks are held in ERC 161 at 3:30 PM on Wednesdays. A reception will be held following the talk in the ERC 401 (KICP Colloquia) and in Hubble Lounge (ERC 501) (Astronomy & Astrophysics Colloquia).
October 3, 2018
October 10, 2018
October 17, 2018
October 24, 2018
October 31, 2018
November 7, 2018
November 14, 2018
November 28, 2018
January 16, 2019
January 30, 2019
February 13, 2019
February 27, 2019
March 13, 2019

  • October 3, 2018 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Wednesday colloquium
    Cosmological results from the legacy data release of the Planck satellite
    Silvia Galli, IAP

    Note: Reception at 4:30 PM in the ERC 401.
  • October 10, 2018 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Wednesday colloquium
    Fundamental Physics with the Simons Observatory
    Brian Keating, UC San Diego

    Note: Reception at 4:30 PM in the ERC 401.

    The Simons Observatory is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. I will describe the scientific goals of the experiment, motivate its design, and forecast its performance. The Simons Observatory will measure the temperature and polarization anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background with arcminute resolution over approximately 40% of the sky in six frequency bands: 27, 39, 93, 145, 225 and 280 GHz. In its initial phase, three small-aperture (0.5-meter diameter) telescopes and one large-aperture (6-meter diameter) telescope will be fielded. These instruments will host a total of 60,000 cryogenic bolometer detectors. I will discuss some of the key science goals of the Simons Observatory, including the characterization of primordial fluctuations, determination of the number of relativistic species, and measuring the mass of neutrinos. I will also discuss other tests of fundamental physics -- some of which may be best measured using Cosmic Microwave Background observations such as the ones we are embarking upon.
  • October 17, 2018 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Astronomy Colloquium
    TBA
    Jay Strader, Michigan State University

    Note: Refreshments served at 4:45 PM, Hubble Lounge
  • October 24, 2018 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Astronomy Colloquium
    TBA
    Keith Hawkins,

    Note: Refreshments served at 4:45 PM, Hubble Lounge
  • October 31, 2018 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Astronomy Colloquium
    Juno's Hunt for Jovian Deep Oxygen, and the Implications for Giant Planet Formation
    Jonathan Lunine, Cornell University

    Note: Refreshments served at 4:45 PM, Hubble Lounge

    The carbon-to-oxygen ratio (C/O) in giant planets is an important indicator of processes in disks that lead to planet formation. However, obtaining this ratio in Jupiter and Saturn is far more difficult than in hot exo-Jupiters, because water condenses out of the visible atmospheres of the solar system’s two giants. For Jupiter, the Galileo Probe almost got us there, but Juno data are required to close in on the deep oxygen abundance. For other planetary systems, JWST will provide very high quality transit spectra that will allow us to see the carbon- and oxygen-bearing species in many giant planets around other stars.
  • November 7, 2018 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Wednesday colloquium
    TBA
    Stephon S Alexander, Brown University
  • November 14, 2018 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Astronomy Colloquium
    TBA
    Jennifer Yee, Harvard University

    Note: Refreshments served at 4:30 PM, Hubble Lounge
  • November 28, 2018 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Astronomy Colloquium
    TBA
    Joe Hennawi, University of California - Santa Barbara

    Note: Refreshments served at 4:30 PM, Hubble Lounge
  • January 16, 2019 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Astronomy Colloquium
    TBA
    ,

    Note: Refreshments served at 4:45 PM, Hubble Lounge
  • January 30, 2019 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Astronomy Colloquium
    TBA
    Ian Crossfield, MIT

    Note: Refreshments served at 4:45 PM, Hubble Lounge
  • February 13, 2019 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Astronomy Colloquium
    TBA
    Roger Blandford, Stanford University

    Note: Refreshments served at 4:45 PM, Hubble Lounge
  • February 27, 2019 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Astronomy Colloquium
    TBA
    Mansi Kasliwal, Caltech

    Note: Refreshments served at 4:45 PM, Hubble Lounge
  • March 13, 2019 | 3:30 PM | ERC 161 | Astronomy Colloquium
    TBA
    Mark Vogelsberger, MIT

    Note: Refreshments served at 4:45 PM, Hubble Lounge

 
FRIDAY NOON SEMINARS
KICP Friday noon seminar: Unless otherwise noted, all talks are held in ERC 401 at Noon on Fridays.
June 29, 2018
October 12, 2018
October 19, 2018
November 16, 2018
November 30, 2018
December 7, 2018

  • June 29, 2018 | 12:00 PM | ERC 401 | Friday noon seminar
    Mapping the Milky Way in 6D with Gaia
    Jo Bovy, The University of Toronto

    One of the main goals of Gaia, a new astrometric satellite mission, is to provide an empirical measurement of the distribution of stars in the 6+N dimensional space of position, velocity, age, mass, elemental abundances, color, magnitude, etc.. Knowledge of this empirical distribution will allow the formation, evolution, and dynamics of the Milky Way to be strongly constrained. I will give an overview of the Gaia mission and discuss novel methods to map the Milky Way in position and velocity using the billion-star Gaia catalog. I will then discuss results on the stellar content and dynamics of the solar neighborhood from applying these techniques to Gaia's first and second data release. I will also discuss the implications of the structure in the velocity distribution in the extended solar neighborhood observed in Gaia's second data release.
  • October 12, 2018 | 12:00 PM | ERC 401 | Friday noon seminar
    Cosmology with Neutral Hydrogen Absorbers
    Simeon Bird, UC Riverside
  • October 19, 2018 | 12:00 PM | ERC 401 | Friday noon seminar
    Precision Cosmology with the Cosmic Microwave Background from Chile
    Sara M. Simon, University of Michigan

    The cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides unparalleled views into the early universe and its later evolution. Recent and ongoing experiments have contributed to our understanding of neutrinos, dark energy, and dark matter through measurements of large scale structure imprinted on the CMB and constrained the conditions in the early universe, tightly restricting inflationary and other cosmological models through measurements of CMB polarization. Next-generation CMB experiments like Simons Observatory will further constrain the sum of the neutrino masses and number of relativistic species, expand our understanding of dark energy and dark matter, and set new constraints on cosmological models describing the first moments of the universe. The polarization in the CMB is faint, so future experiments must be orders of magnitude more sensitive. Additionally, both polarized foregrounds from synchrotron and dust emission and systematic effects from the instruments can create spurious polarization signals. Characterizing and removing foregrounds requires wide frequency coverage, while systematic effects must be modeled, mitigated and calibrated at unprecedented levels. I will discuss several advances in instrumentation and analysis that will be critical for this leap in performance.
  • November 16, 2018 | 12:00 PM | ERC 401 | Friday noon seminar
    Empirical Determination of the Local Velocity Distribution of Dark Matter
    Lina Necib, Caltech
  • November 30, 2018 | 12:00 PM | ERC 401 | Friday noon seminar
    Low Energy Probes of Particle Physics
    Surjeet Rajendran, UC Berkeley
  • December 7, 2018 | 12:00 PM | ERC 401 | Friday noon seminar
    Searching for Dark Matter Interactions in Cosmology
    Kimberly Boddy, Johns Hopkins University

 
SPECIAL SEMINARS
July 18, 2018
August 15, 2018
September 21, 2018

  • July 18, 2018 | 3:30 PM | ERC 445 | Special seminar
    CANCELLED
    Black Holes for Massive Gravitons
    Rachel Rosen, Columbia University

    In this talk I will review the status of black hole solutions for theories in which the gravitational force is mediated by a massive spin - 2 particle. I will present the arguments that such black holes must necessarily be time - dependent and I will discuss the implications for black hole mechanics.
  • August 15, 2018 | 1:00 PM | ERC 401 | Special seminar
    Optimal CMB Lensing Reconstruction and Improved Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves
    Marius Millea, IAP

    The next generation of CMB experiments are slated to measure the CMB polarization to noise levels and angular resolutions never before probed. One of the most exciting and revolutionary possibilities for this data would be a discovery of the non-zero tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$, i.e. the first detection of the background of gravitational waves produced by inflation. These gravitational waves are detectable via their impact on CMB B-mode polarization, however the B-modes are also significantly contaminated by the effects of gravitational lensing. Removing this lensing-induced B-mode foreground (called "delensing") will be necessary to obtain the tightest possible constraints on $r$. While at present-day noise levels, so-called "quadratic estimator" techniques have been massively successful in estimating and removing the lensing contamination, they become statistically sub-optimal at the noise-levels of even very near-future experiments. It is an open question how to improve upon them, and an exciting one because the potential is to shrink the error bar on $r$ by factors of a few, maybe turning a few-sigma hint of gravitational waves into a full blown discovery! In this talk, I will discuss an optimal Bayesian delensing method which we've developed to solve this problem. In the spirit of this being very much ongoing work, I will tell you about both successes we have had but also roadblocks and outstanding issues. Ultimately, this method can yield not only improved constraints on $r$, but also yield better reconstructions of the lensing potential which can be used in cross-correlations with various other low-redshift probes of structures.
  • September 21, 2018 | 1:00 PM | ERC 401 | Special seminar
    From the Accelerating Universe to Accelerating Science
    Robert Kirshner, Clowes Research Professor of Science, Harvard University Chief Program Officer for Science, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

    Twenty years ago, astronomers were astonished to learn from observations of exploding stars that cosmic expansion is speeding up. We attribute this to a mysterious “dark energy” that pervades the universe and makes up 70% of it. Scientists are working in many ways to learn more about the nature of dark energy, but our reservoir of ignorance is deep. This talk will summarize the present state of knowledge and look ahead to new ways to use infrared observations of supernovae to improve our grip on dark energy. Accelerating scientific discovery is a mission of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and I will illustrate some of the ways we do that in Chicago and beyond.

 
OPEN GROUP SEMINARS
July 5, 2018
July 26, 2018
September 17, 2018

  • July 5, 2018 | 3:00 PM | PRC 201 | Open Group seminar
    Electroweak Baryogenesis through varying Yukawas in Composite Higgs models
    Sebastian Bruggisser, DESY

    Varying Yukawas open new possibilities for electroweak baryogenesis. In this talk I will start by introducing varying Yukawas as a source of CP-violation and explain how baryogenesis can be successful in this framework. I will then present a realization of this paradigm in Composite Higgs models with partial compositeness. Composite Higgs models are, apart from the usual benefits, particularly compelling for this scenario as they feature an intimate link between flavour and Higgs physics. We will see that baryogenesis can be successful in these models if the confinement phase transition happens at the same time as the electroweak phase transition. I will identify regions in parameter space where this is fulfilled and I will compute the baryon yield of those models.
  • July 26, 2018 | 12:00 PM | ERC 401 | Open Group seminar
    Dark Energy with Euclid
    Santiago Casas, CEA Paris-Saclay

    Euclid is an ESA medium-class mission expected to launch in 2022 that will map the geometry of the Universe by imaging 109 galaxies and measuring 107 galaxy redshifts in 15000 square degrees of the sky. This will provide us detailed information about the accelerated expansion, the evolution of large-scale structure and the matter-energy content of the Universe up to a redshift of about z ≈ 2. In this talk, I will review how the main probes of Euclid, namely galaxy clustering and weak lensing, will be able to constrain theories beyond the standard cosmological ΛCDM model and how we will be able to pin down the equation of state of dark energy with about 1% precision. Galaxy clustering measures mainly the movement of tracers along geodesics, while weak lensing is an almost direct mapping of the gravitational potentials at large scales. Using both of these observables, we can obtain valuable information about the growth of perturbations and the geometrical quantities of the Universe and therefore constrain the properties of General Relativity. Since the measurements of Euclid will also give insights on the properties of dark matter and neutrinos at cosmological scales, I will also show how we can measure non-standard couplings between matter species and dark energy and how we can give tight constraints on many alternative theories of gravity.
  • September 17, 2018 | 10:30 AM | ERC 419 | Open Group seminar
    Analytic IR-resummation for the BAO peak
    Matt Lewandowski, IPhT

    We develop an analytic method for implementing the IR-resummation of 1404.5954, which allows one to correctly and consistently describe the imprint of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) on statistical observables in large-scale structure. We show that the final IR-resummed correlation function can be computed analytically without relying on numerical integration, thus allowing for an efficient and accurate use of these predictions on real data in cosmological parameter fitting. In this work we focus on the one-loop correlation function, where the challenge is to reproduce the BAO peak. We show that, compared with the standard numerical integration method of IR-resummation, the new method is accurate to better than 0.2%, and is quite easily improvable. We also give an approximate resummation scheme which is based on using the linear displacements of a fixed fiducial cosmology, which when combined with the method described above, is about six times faster than the standard numerical integration. Finally, we show that this analytic method is generalizable to higher loop computations.

 
THURSDAY LUNCH DISCUSSIONS
KICP's Thunch: KICP Cosmology Lunch (Thunch) Weekly on Thursdays, Noon, ERC 401A.

Please join us for an informal lunch discussion, led by KICP fellows, of recent news and papers in cosmology. Topics range from experiment and observations to theory in all areas of KICP science. To submit or view papers for this week's Thunch please visit the Thunch website.


 
ASTRONOMY TUESDAY SEMINARS


 
ASTRONOMY SPECIAL SEMINARS
July 9, 2018

  • July 9, 2018 | 12:00 PM | ERC 501 | Special Seminar
    The Drunken Trek of Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays Through The Magnetic Field of the Milky Way
    Vasiliki Pavlidou, University of Crete

    Cosmic rays are charged so that the magnetic field of the galaxy acts as a distorting lens to our view of the ultra-high-energy cosmic ray sky. I will discuss how we can reconstruct this lens and use it to our advantage to investigate both where cosmic rays come from, and what their composition is.