Refreshments will be served in CP 179 at 3:15 PM

NASA's SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy), an airborne observatory optimized for conducting astrophysical investigations across the infrared-to-sub-millimeter spectral range, is an international partnership between the U.S. and German space agencies. As an airborne telescope optimized for infrared data collection SOFIA offers the only regular access to the wide swath of infrared wavelengths obscured by Earth's lower atmosphere and unavailable to ground-based observatories.

The presentation will focus on scientific results, some surprise discoveries, and unique analysis techniques utilizing SOFIA data. One dominant theme is how stars are able to form in extreme environments such as in the Galactic Center, where energetic radiation fields and a hot, turbulent medium in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole would seemingly be unconducive to the observed prolific star production. SOFIA offers unique tools for such studies, such as the ability to reveal kinematic signatures showing the details of how a star forming cloud collapsed to its current state, as well as providing clocks capable of directly measuring the collapse timescales for comparison to theoretical predictions.

Refreshments will be served in CP 179 at 3:15 PM

In a quantum quench, system is prepared in some initial state (usually the ground state of some hamiltonian) and then allowed evolve in isolation with a different hamiltonian, for example, by rapidly quenching a parameter. This is most interesting for many-body systems where one can ask questions such as whether subsystems reach a stationary state, whether this state appears thermal, and how quickly does it reach this state. Although an obvious set of problems, they have only recently come to the fore with possibility of performing such experiments in ultra-cold atoms and other systems. In this talk I will try to address these questions in the context of some simple, and not-so-simple exactly solvable models.
 

Refreshments will be served in CP 179 at 3:15 PM

When photons scatter, their angular distribution and energy shift reveal information about the structure of the scattering target. As a result, photon scattering has long been used to study materials at the atomic and molecular level. By substantially increasing the photon energy, experiments can also be used to measure electromagnetic properties of the proton and neutron -- properties which are sensitively related to the interactions among the constituent quarks and gluons. We will discuss experiments which measure the electric and magnetic polarizabilities of the nucleon, and present new results for the neutron.
 

Refreshments will be served in CP 179 at 3:15 PM

Details of the chemical composition of stars provide information about the formation and evolution of the galaxies in which they form. I will outline some of the connections and provide some results for our Milky Way Galaxy from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE). APOGEE is providing maps of the abundances of stars across the Milky Way. These suggest different timescales for star formation in different locations, both radially and vertically within the disk of the Galaxy, and also suggest that movement of stars within the Galaxy, through a process knows as radial migration, is important.

Refreshments will be served in CP 179 at 3:15 PM

Twenty years ago, the Material Chip's invention allowed 10^3-10^4 materials with different compositions to be synthesized under the same conditions and characterized for physical properties in one experiment. Ten years ago, the development of the Materials Phase Diagram Chip allowed ternary phase diagrams at a constant synthesis temperature to be mapped in one experiment. Today, a complete phase diagram (a 3D contour with a 2D composition map and a temperature axis) can be mapped in one experiment with a single Materials Phase Diagram Chip, increasing the efficiency of phase diagram mapping by million-fold. The physics and implications of these chips will be discussed.

Refreshments will be served in CP 179 at 3:15 PM

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) will outfit the 10 m HET with an array of 150 integral-field fiber-coupled spectrographs covering 3500-5500A ̊ at ∼ 5A ̊ resolution. These are fed by 75 450-fiber IFUs distributed on a grid within a 20 arcmin field. This instrument, called VIRUS (Hill et al., 2014), will survey a 420 deg2 field in 3 years starting 2015. We will detect 0.8 million Lyman-α emitting (LAE) galaxies at 1.9 < z < 3.5 and more than one million [OII]-emitting galaxies at z < 0.5. The 3-D map of LAEs in a 9 Gpc3 volume will be used to measure the expansion history and the growth of structure at an early epoch (z ∼ 3). HETDEX is designed to provide a 3σ direct detection of dark energy at z ∼ 3 (for w = −1). HETDEX will constrain the evolution of dark energy and will also provide 0.1%-level accuracy on the curvature of the Universe, ten times better than current measurements; HETDEX will also provide competitive constraints on the total neutrino mass and on inflation models.

Refreshments will be served in CP 179 at 3:15 PM

As much as any science field, astronomy is about origins. Therefore, the origins of stars is a central question in the field. For more than a century, it has been known that stars form via gravitational contraction of clouds of interstellar gas and dust. And for more than a half century, it has been known that weak magnetic fields of uncertain origin can play a crucial role in the star formation process. Unfortunately, magnetic field strengths in interstellar space are notoriously difficult to measure. I will explain why magnetic fields are important to star formation, how we measure them, and what we now know about the interactions between gravity and magnetic fields during the star formation process. Curiously, magnetic fields in space can impede star formation, yet they are also essential to star formation. Without magnetic fields, there would be no Sun, no Earth, and no one to listen to this talk.

Refreshments will be served in CP 179 at 3:15 PM