Events at Physics |
Events During the Week of November 28th through December 5th, 2010
Monday, November 29th, 2010
- Plasma Physics (Physics/ECE/NE 922) Seminar
- Electric Fields in Quasi-Symmetric and Quasi-Isodynamic Stellarators
- Time: 12:00 pm
- Place: 2535 Engineering Hall
- Speaker: Matt Landreman, MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center
- Plasma Theory Seminar
- A Pedestal Structure Model
- Time: 4:00 pm
- Place: 514 ERB
- Speaker: James D. Callen, UW-Madison Dept of Engineering Physics
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
- No events scheduled
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
- Department Meeting
- Time: 12:15 pm
- Place: 5310 Chamberlin Hall
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
- Astronomy Colloquium
- Explanetary Systems-What do they teach about the Solar System?
- Time: 3:30 pm
- Place: 4421 Sterling Hall
- Speaker: George Rieke, University of Arizona
- Abstract: When we set out seriously to search for other planetary systems nearly two decades ago, it seemed obvious that they would be analogs to the Solar System. Some could possibly be abodes for life, and therefore would illuminate our past and future. Now we know of more than 500 exoplanets, but they represent an evolutionary end point completely foreign to us and perhaps in most cases hostile to the development of sophisticated life. Is this a selection effect, resulting from the bias of our two most successful search techniques toward massive planets close to their stars? A third approach, study of planetary debris disks, brings a countervailing bias toward planetesimal systems on large orbits. It has been equally successful with more than 300 systems known. They are marked by evidence for planetesimal belts analogous to the Kuiper Belt and in some cases the asteroid belt. Their resemblance to the Solar System lets us study them to constrain our models of how our system formed and evolved; they are also signposts for the detection of massive planets on orbits far from their stars. I will describe the current knowledge of debris systems, outlining evidence for: 1.) a general decay of planet-building activity similar to that deduced for the Solar System; 2.) occasional large collisions analogous at least in destructive power to the one that led to the formation of our moon; 3.) the behavior of planetesimals near the ice line, the possible sources of volatile gases on Earth; and 4.) similarities and differences of the outer planetesimal zones in other systems to our Kuiper Belt.
- Host: Astro Dept
- NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forum
- New Physics in B_s mixing: Uplifted SUSY
- Time: 4:00 pm
- Place: 4274 Chamberlin
- Speaker: Adam Martin, Fermilab
- Abstract: The anomalous dimuon charge asymmetry reported by the D0
Collaboration may be due to the tree-level exchange of some spin-0
particles that mediate CP violation in B_s-ar{B}_s meson mixing. In
this talk I will introduce the D0 result and show that the range of
couplings and masses necessary to generate a large charge asymmetry is
natural in a variation of the MSSM known as "uplifted supersymmetry". - Host: Andreas Ross
- Graduate Introductory Seminar
- Condensed Matter Experimental
- Time: 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
- Place: 2223 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Eriksson, Himpsel, Lagally, McDermott, Onellion, Rzchowski, Winokur
Friday, December 3rd, 2010
- NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forum
- Joint with Pheno
- String moduli phenomenology, cosmological history, and dark matter
- Time: 2:30 pm
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Gordy Kane, U. Michigan
- Abstract: In this talk I argue that compactified string theories with broken supersymmetry and with stabilized moduli generically have one or more moduli with masses of order the gravitino mass or less. Then cosmological constraints imply the gravitino and moduli masses are of order 30 TeV or heavier, which implies the universe has a non-thermal cosmological history. This in turn suggests that the LSP is wino-like, predicting in particular a signal for galactic positrons and antiprotons consistent with that seen by the PAMELA satellite, and interesting LHC signals. Although the above results hold very generally in string theories, we were led to them from our earlier compactification of M-theory on a G2 manifold, so I will begin the talk with a review of the G2 results.
- Host: Michael Ramsey-Musolf
- Physics Department Colloquium
- Time: 4:00 pm
- Place: 2241 Chamberlin Hall (coffee at 3:30 pm)
- Speaker: Alan Aspuru-Guzik, Harvard University
- Abstract: Canceled
- Host: Saffman