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January[0]=["31","Dan Hooper","Fermilab","The Empirical Case For 10 GeV Dark Matter","I will summarize and discuss the body of evidence which has accumulated in favor of dark matter in the form of approximately 10 GeV particles. This evidence includes the spectrum and angular distribution of gamma rays from the Galactic Center, the synchrotron emission from the Milky Way's radio filaments, the diffuse synchrotron emission from the Inner Galaxy (the 'WMAP Haze') and low-energy signals from the direct detection experiments DAMA/LIBRA, CoGeNT and CRESST-II. This collection of observations can be explained by a relatively light dark matter particle with an annihilation cross section consistent with that predicted for a simple thermal relic (sigma v ~ 10^-26 cm^3/s) and with a distribution in the halo of the Milky Way consistent with that predicted from simulations. Astrophysical explanations for the gamma ray and synchrotron signals, in contrast, have not been successful in accommodating these observations. Similarly, the phase of the annual modulation observed by DAMA/LIBRA (and now supported by CoGeNT) is inconsistent with all known or postulated modulating backgrounds, but are in good agreement with expectations for dark matter scattering. This scenario is consistent with all existing indirect and collider constraints, as well as the constraints placed by CDMS. Consistency with xenon-based experiments can be achieved if the response of liquid xenon to very low-energy nuclear recoils is somewhat suppressed relative to previous evaluations, or if the dark matter possesses different couplings to protons and neutrons.","",""];

February[0]=["7","Martin White","Berkeley","Redshift space distortions and the growth of cosmic structure","Martin White's abstract","",""];

February[1]=["14","Mark Reid","CFA","The Spiral Structure and Kinematics of the Milky Way","The Bar and Spiral Structure Legacy (BeSSeL) Survey is an NRAO Key Science Project that has been awarded 5000 hours of VLBA observing time from 2010 to 2015.  Results from the first year's observations will be presented.  A major goal is to determine the Milky Way's spiral structure by measuring trigonometric parallaxes and proper motions for hundreds of high-mass star forming regions.  Also, with full 3-dimensional spatial and velocity information, we will be able to construct an accurate rotation curve for the Milky Way and estimate the distance to the Galactic center and the circular rotation speed at the Sun to about 1% accuracy.","",""];

February[2]=["21","Andrzej Udalski","Warsaw","OGLE-IV - The Fourth Phase of the OGLE Survey","OGLE-IV, in operation since March 2010, is one of the largest sky surveys worldwide, regularly monitoring about one billion objects and collecting over 30 TB of raw data per year with the new generation 32-chip CCD mosaic camera. During the talk current status of the OGLE-IV project, latest results on microlensing exoplanet search, solar system object and variable sky studies as well as future plans will be presented.","",""];

February[3]=["28","Alicia Soderberg","CFA","Supernova Forensics","For several decades, observational studies of supernova (SN) explosions have focused almost exclusively on the optical emission that dominates their bolometric luminosity. Yet many of the leading breakthroughs in our understanding of supernovae have been enabled by observations at other wavelengths (e.g., the neutrinos from SN1987A, the Crab X-ray pulsar). My research group focuses on revealing additional such clues through untraditional supernova studies. For example, through a combination of gamma-ray and radio observations, I showed that only 0.1% of all core-collapse supernovae produce relativistic outflows that give rise to gamma-ray bursts (GRBs; Soderberg et al. Nature 2010). Next, my serendipitous X-ray discovery of SN 2008D caught in the act of exploding revealed a novel technique to discover new supernovae at the moment the shockwave rips through the stellar surface (Soderberg et al. Nature, 2008). This seminal discovery confirmed the decades-old prediction for supernova 'shock breakout' emission; current and future X-ray satellites will soon reveal additional events. Finally, with the advent of the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) - the world's most sensitive radio and mm-band telescopes - the next advancement in our understanding of supernovae will be enabled by observations at longer wavelengths, lambda ~ 0.04-20 cm.","",""];

March[0]=["6","Eliot Quataert","Berkeley","The Physics of Feedback during Galaxy Formation","Elliot Quataert's abstract","",""];

March[1]=["13","Masataka Fukugita","IPMU/IAS","The cosmic energy inventory: the problems posed by the inventory and  those solved","We have been constructing the cosmic energy inventory, which registers all forms of the energy existing in the universe. Examinations of the consistency across the entries tell us how well we understand the astrophysics of the universe, where the evolution is viewed as the relocation of the energy. I talk about some salient problems posed by this consideration and those solved, with emphasis on the recent work we have done.","",""];

March[2]=["20","Warren Brown","Harvard","Hypervelocity stars","A massive black hole sits in the heart of the Milky Way. One consequence of the black hole is that it ejects 'hypervelocity stars' from the Milky Way at ~1000 km/s velocities.  We discovered the first hypervelocity star in 2005, and since then our targeted survey has discovered 20 unbound stars and a comparable number of possibly bound hypervelocity stars.  Recent results include a surprising anisotropic spatial distribution of hypervelocity stars, unbound disk runaways, and HST proper motion measurements that may allow us constrain the shape and orientation of the Galactic potential.","",""];

March[3]=["27","Adam Showman","Arizona","Atmospheric circulation of extrasolar giant planets","Adam Showman's abstract","",""];

April[0]=["3","Eiichiro Komatsu","UT Austin","Hunting for Dark Matter in Anisotropies of the Gamma-ray Sky: Predictions and First Observational Results from Fermi-LAT","Can we use the Fermi satellite like WMAP? In 2006, S. Ando and I proposed to use anisotropies in the gamma-ray background (not CMB!) as a smoking-gun signature of annihilation of dark matter particles in the universe. The idea is simple: since dark matter traces the large-scale structure of the universe, the emission from dark matter must be anisotropic, and its spatial pattern is predictable. The use of anisotropy (especially the power spectrum) was new to the gamma-ray community, so I teamed up with the Fermi-LAT team to look for this signature. Here, we report on the first detection of anisotropy in the diffuse gamma-ray background measured by Fermi-LAT. We find that the detected signal is very likely due to unresolved blazers. Subtracting this signal, we can place a fairly stringent upper limit on the residual anisotropy signal, which would then put constraints on dark matter properties.","",""];

April[1]=["10","Roger Chevalier","UVA","Superluminous supernovae","Superluminous supernovae can have optical luminosities hundreds of times larger than normal events. I argue that most of these are the result of interaction with dense circumstellar matter and can be viewed as shock breakout in a dense medium. A viscous shock forms at moderate optical depth; its high energy emission is affected by the dense environment. Luminous supernovae are related to Type IIn (narrow emission line) supernovae and possibly to subluminous gamma-ray bursts. The dense circumstellar matter is not expected in standard stellar evolution and I speculate on its origin.","",""];

April[2]=["17","Jonathan Lunine","Cornell","The persistence of methane through time on Saturn's moon Titan","Methane creates a volatile cycle on Titan akin to the Earth's hydrologic cycle. But why does methane continue to do so after 4.5 billion years of geologic time when it is so unstable against photolysis? I will show how a variety of Cassini -Huygens data can be assembled to yield a self-consistent picture of methane resupply over time.","",""];

April[3]=["24","Jens Chluba","CITA","Spectral distortions of the CMB and what we might learn about early universe physics","The CMB spectrum is known to be extremely close to a perfect blackbody. However, even within standard cosmology several processes occurring in the early Universe lead to distortions of the CMB at a level that might become observable in the future. In my talk I will briefly review the cosmological thermalization problem, which is crucial for understanding how primordial spectral distortions could be created and how they evolve. I will then explain in more detail how the cooling of matter in the early Universe causes a negative mu- and y-type distortion and how the damping of primordial small-scale perturbations before recombination allows placing interesting constraints on different inflationary models.","",""];

May[0]=["1","Eric Gawiser","Rutgers","Probing Dark Matter and Dark Energy with Lyman Alpha Emitting Galaxies","The spatial clustering of distant galaxies is a powerful probe of both the nature of those galaxies and of fundamental physics.  The MUSYC collaboration used the connection between galaxies and their dark matter halos to identify distant Lyman Alpha Emitting (LAE) galaxies as the progenitors of typical present-day galaxies like the Milky Way.  I will summarize our measurements of the physical properties of LAEs and their connection to present-day galaxies.  The HETDEX experiment will discover nearly one million LAEs during the next three years and will use them to determine the expansion history of the universe revealed by Baryon Acoustic Oscillations.  These measurements will determine the dark energy equation-of-state and will measure the curvature of the Universe to 0.1% precision.  The forthcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will greatly expand upon these results, using billions of distant galaxies to measure the evolution of the dark energy equation of state, to seek evidence for modifications to General Relativity, and to constrain the masses of cosmological neutrinos. I will describe the observational techniques and survey design that will enable these measurements.","",""];

May[1]=["8","Glennys Farrar","NYU","Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays: What are they? Where do they come from? What can they teach us?","The Pierre Auger Observatory has recorded a large number of Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays, the detector is well understood, and a multitude of different analyses on sources and composition of UHECRs have been performed. The observational data is much cleaner and clearer than ever before, yet definitive answers to the most fundamental questions still elude us -- for extremely interesting reasons!   In this talk I will give an overview of the observational situation and describe some very recent developments which suggest that a consistent picture may be emerging.","",""];

May[2]=["15","Jim Stone","Princeton","Radiation Magnetohydrodynamics of Accretion Disks and Feedback","Studies of a variety of gas dynamical problems, for example the saturation of the MRI in the inner regions of accretion disks around compact objects, or the effects of feedback from starbursts and/or AGN, require numerical algorithms for radiation magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). A new method which relaxes some of the restrictive assumptions of previous approaches will be described.  The method is currently being used for a variety of applications, and preliminary results from these studies will be presented.  In particular, motivated by the problem of radiation feedback, we present initial studies of the nonlinear evolution of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability in radiation-supported atmospheres, and the ablation of dense clumps in the ISM by radiation.  In addition, new studies of the saturation amplitude of the MRI in radiation dominated disks using the local shearing box approximation will be described.","",""];

May[3]=["22","Andrew MacFadyen","NYU","The Dynamics and Afterglow Radiation of Gamma Ray Bursts","Andrew MacFadyen's abstract","",""];

May[4]=["29","Dieter Breitschwerdt","Berlin","Modeling the Interstellar Medium in Star Forming Galaxies","Dieter Breitschwerdt's abstract","",""];

June[0] = ["19", "Wilhelm Kley", "Universitat Tubingen", "Planet-disk interaction and orbital evolution of planets", "The observed orbital properties of exoplanetary systems are distinctly different from our own solar Solar System. In particular their small distance from the star, their high eccentricity and large mass point to the existence of a phase with strong mutual excitations. A very important ingredient is planet-disk interaction. During their early evolution, young planets are still embedded within the protoplanetary accretion disk. In the talk I will present new results on this important process. As discovered during the last years the magnitude and direction of migration depends crucially on the physics in the immediate environment next to the planet. The importance of the planet-disk interaction process in shaping the dynamical structure of planetary systems will be presented.", "", ""];

September[0] = ["18","Kathryn Zurek", "Michigan", "In search of dark matter: models and their experimental signatures", "", "",""];

September[1] = ["25", "Ue-Li Pen", "CITA", "21cm cosmology", "", "",""];

October[0] = ["2", "Frank Shu", "UCSD, Academia Sinica", "Reversing climate change with high-throughput biochar", "Climate change is here and may become catastrophic before the end of the century if we do not transition away from the burning fossil fuels as the primary source of our energy.  In this talk we focus on the work of our research team in the thermal-chemical manufacture of high-throughput biochar, biodiesel, and syngas  from renewable biomass processed by supertorrefaction with benign molten salts that remain liquids at atmospheric pressure and many hundreds of degrees Celsius.  The proposed technology takes advantage of the extensive infrastructure and distribution system established for fossil fuels.  If the biochar is buried as a soil amendment to repair lands damaged by past unsustainable practices, the entire process can be carbon negative.  Carbon capture and sequestration technology makes even burning it as a fuel carbon negative.  Its employment on feedstock residues can also improve the carbon footprint of biofuel processes that do not make use of the whole plant.  Thus, biochar production by supertorrefaction can rollback the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to below the levels that are on course to melt the polar ice caps completely.  We have built a tabletop model that shows automation of the process of supertorrefaction is possible, and we are now planning a demonstration plant in Taiwan to prove that supertorrefaction can produce energy products cheaper than mined coal, petroleum, or natural gas.  We are looking for academic and industrial partners that can help us with this overall mission, and we charge the students in college today with the task of leading civilization to a brighter achievable vision for its long-term future. The talk is available at http://www.sns.ias.edu/~seminar/IAS_Biochar.pdf", "",""];

October[1] = ["9", "William Press", "U Texas", "Eight Dimensions is Big Enough: Surprises in the Prisoner's Dilemma Game", "The two-player iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game has been used for 30 years to model evolution, especially the emergence of cooperation. But it still holds surprises, even in the simplest case where the game can be modeled as two simple functions on an eight-dimensional cube. Freeman Dyson and I have shown that the game contains extortionate strategies, where a player who knows the secret can extract an 'unfair' advantage over a player who doesn't, especially any simple evolutionary player. When both players know the secret, the game is an ultimatum game, where each player sets the other player's score, and each can enforce cooperation.", "",""];

October[2] = ["16", "Sean Andrews", "CfA", "Observing the Hallmarks of Planet Formation in Circumstellar Disks", "Some of the fundamental processes involved in the assembly of planetary systems are just now becoming accessible to astronomical observations of circumstellar disks.  The new promise of observational work in the field of planet formation makes for a very dynamic research scenario, which is certain to be amplified in the coming years as the revolutionary ALMA facility ramps up to full operations.  To highlight some of the new directions being explored in this field, I will describe how we are using high angular resolution measurements at radio wavelengths to study two crucial aspects of the formation and early evolution of planetary systems: (1) the growth and migration of disk solids, and (2) the interactions between a young planetary system and its natal, gas-rich disk.  For the former, I will demonstrate that we have identified evidence for spatial variations in both the particle size distribution and (potentially) the gas:dust mass ratio in young disks, and how those could translate into new constraints on models of grain growth and radial drift.  And for the latter, I will review what we have learned from directly resolved radio observations of large, dust-depleted cavities in the centers of so-called 'transition'  disks, including their surprisingly high frequency and some possibilities for the observational study of planet-disk interactions.", "",""];

October[3] = ["23", "Adam Lidz", "Penn", "The Epoch of Reionization", "", "",""];

October[4] = ["30", "Janna Levin", "Columbia", "Big Black Hole, Little Neutron Star", "We describe a novel mechanism to generate electromagnetic luminosities powered by a black hole battery in an astrophysical circuit with a neutron-star magnet.", "","Cancelled"];

November[0] = ["6", "Jill Knapp", "Princeton University", "SDSS Spectroscopy of Peculiar Stars", "The vast data base produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey enables the identification and study of rare objects in sample sizes large enough to investigate their ensemble properties. This talk will include an overview of some of the work on stellar samples in the local galactic neighborhood, including: carbon-enhanced dwarf main sequence stars; low-mass metal-poor stars; close M-dwarf white-dwarf pairs and the role of of orbital angular momentum in enhancing stellar activity; and star formation in local dense and diffuse clouds. The large sample of carbon-enhanced dwarf stars makes it possible to derive a statistical luminosity function and align it with that of non-carbon-enriched dwarf stars. The carbon-enhanced dwarfs are the analogues of main-sequence K and early M stars but not of stars of about M3 and later, consistent with the increasing depth of the convection zone and atmospheric carbon enhancement due to mass transfer.", "",""];

November[1] = ["13", "Brad Hansen", "UCLA", "Piecing together the elements of Planetary System Formation", "As the observational data accumulates, it is becoming possible to place quantitative constraints on the role different physical processes play in the formation and evolution of planetary systems. I will discuss constraints on the role of tidal dissipation in the emplacement of hot Jupiters and on the assembly of multiple planetary systems observed by the Kepler spacecraft.", "",""];

November[2] = ["20", "No talk", "Thanksgiving", "", "", "","No talk"];

November[3] = ["27", "Latham Boyle", "Perimeter", "Platonic Orbits, Streaming Lattices, Time-Delay Interferometers, and Low Frequency Gravitational Wave Telescopes", "I will present several interesting problems that arise when thinking about how to design gravitational wave telescopes.  In describing the solutions to these problems, I will try to convey why I think some of them may be of interest well beyond the confines of gravitational wave astronomy.", "",""];

December[0] = ["4", "Fabio Governato", "UW", "Cusps, cores and baryons: Or how Cold Dark Matter is the worst model of galaxy formation, except for all the others", "I will show results from cosmological simulations of galaxy formation where  repeated gas outflows  remove low angular momentum gas and transfer energy to the DM.  This process  solves  three long lasting problems in galaxy formation: the substructure overabundance, the existence of bulgeless galaxies, and the presence of ubiquitous DM 'cores' at the center of dwarf field  galaxies. I will then discuss the existing challenges to CDM  in the context of alternative models to Cold Dark Matter as  WDM and SIDM.", "",""];

December[1] = ["11", "Eric Bell", "Michigan", "The effects and importance of galaxy merging in a cosmological context", "Mergers between dark matter halos, and the galaxies in them, are a central feature of Lambda CDM. In this talk, I explore the role of galaxy merging in setting the properties of galaxies, in particular the properties of non-star forming (quiescent) early-type galaxies. I will discuss a number of relevant considerations : the observation that the best structural predictor of quiescence is light profile shape (i.e., relative size of the bulge); the comparison between inferred merger rates and the rate of creation of early-type galaxies; the effect of merging on setting the scaling relations of present-day early-type galaxies, and the result that <~10% of cosmic-averaged star formation is directly triggered by mergers. I will argue that mergers are a crucial part of how early-type galaxies come into place. I will conclude with a number of potentially important open issues: the frequent existence of disks and/or rotation in early-type galaxies, controversies about the amount of evolution in stellar mass and size in the most massive early-type galaxies, the ever-open issue of the feedback mechanism that actually keeps cold gas out of galaxies, and thoughts about the importance of galaxy merging at small galaxy masses.", "",""];