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// ["Date","Name","Affiliation","Title","Abstract","Day","Time"]
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// ** If Day or Time field is not empty, special day/time
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January[0]=["14","Wick Haxton","Berkeley","Solar Chemical Anomalies and Late Accretion","One of the last problems that John Bahcall considered was the solar abundance problem, the conflict between helioseismology, which indicates a high-metallicity solar core, and improved analyses of photospheric absorption lines, which favor a low surface metallicity. I will present some qualitative arguments to show that the metal segregation accompanying planetary formation is sufficient to account for both results, and some quantitative ones that suggest that it may be difficult to identify a specific low-metallicity accretion scenario capable of accommodating all of the data. I will describe a solar neutrino experiment that could help us make progress, allowing us to directly determine components of the Sun's core metallicity.","",""];

January[1]=["21","Ray Carlberg","U Toronto","Gaps in Galactic Stellar Streams","The LCDM paradigm predicts that the Milky Way dark halo has nearly 10% of its mass in the form of thousands of sub-halos, far more than can be accounted for with the known dwarf galaxies.  Globular clusters dissolving in the tidal field of the galaxy create long, thin stellar stream. Sub-halos that orbit through a stream will create a density gap in the stream. The visibility of the gap depends on the stream dynamics and the size of the sub-halo.  Observers have noted that star streams have significant density variations along their length. The degree to which the observed stream density variations may be quantitatively consistent with the presence of a rich dark matter sub-halo population is considered.","",""];

January[2]=["28","Nick Scoville","Caltech","ALMA Observations of Galaxy Evolution and Nuclear Activity","In the COSMOS survey we have now imaged the large scale structures out to redshift 3 using 200,000 galaxies with precision photometric redshifts. The evolution of the galaxies, their stellar masses and star formation activity is found to be strongly differentiated by environment. ALMA observations now also reveal strong evolution in the ISM masses as a function of redshift using a sample of 110 galaxies at z = 0.3 to 3. I also describe ALMA observations and theoretical work on ultra-luminous IR galaxies to determine the levels of starburst and AGN activities.","",""];

February[0]=["4","Paul Steinhardt","Princeton","","","",""];

February[1]=["11","Mark Phillips","Carnegie","On the Source of the Dust Extinction in Type Ia Supernovae","Echelle observations can be used as an independent means of probing the dust extinction of SNe Ia. I show that the extinction of the objects where the diffuse interstellar band at 5780 Angstroms is detected is consistent with the visual extinction derived from the supernova colors. This strongly suggests that the dust is predominantly located in the interstellar medium of the host galaxies and not in circumstellar material associated with the progenitor system. However, the echelle spectra also reveal that one quarter of the supernovae display anomalously large Na I column densities in comparison to the amount of dust extinction derived from their colors. Remarkably, all of the cases of unusually strong Na I D absorption correspond to Blueshifted profiles in the classification scheme of Sternberg et al. (2011). This coincidence suggests that outflowing circumstellar gas is responsible for at least some of the cases of anomalously large Na I column densities.","",""];

February[2]=["18","Ethan Vishniac","University of Saskatchewan","Driving the Dynamo Via Magnetic Helicity Flux: How Differential Rotation Makes Large Scale Magnetic Fields.","Large scale magnetic fields are found everywhere in the universe, from the scales of planets to galactic disks (or larger). Understanding their generation and maintenance has proven to be unexpectedly difficult.  I will discuss topological constraints on the growth of such fields, and argue that they are inconsistent with kinematic dynamo theory.  Instead, I propose a modified version of mean field dynamo theory in which field growth is not exponential, but can grow from infinitestimal seeds in a very short time.  I compare the predictions of the model to observations of stellar magnetic fields.","",""];

February[3]=["25","Mark Devlin","U Penn","Studying the Largest Objects in the Universe Undergoing the the Most Energetic Collisions in the Universe with the World's Biggest (moveable) Telescope","Clusters of Galaxies are the largest gravitationally-bound objects in the Universe.  They form via mergers with energetics that are only rivaled by the Big Bang.  The study of these objects and collisions can reveal the complex processes that govern the interactions. Observations at 90 GHz with the MUSTANG instrument on the GBT provide high (9 arcsec) resolution of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect inside the clusters. Initial observations with the MUSTANG instrument have yielded very promising observations of a few clusters.    We are now in the midst of an upgrade which will allow us to observe hundreds of clusters (assuming we can keep the GBT open!).","",""];

March[0]=["4","Daisuke Nagai","Yale","Cosmology and Astrophysics with Galaxy Clusters","Galaxy clusters are among the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe, whose formation is driven by dark energy and dark matter. The majority of the baryonic mass in clusters resides in the hot X-ray emitting plasma, which also leaves imprints in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Recent X-ray and microwave observations have revealed detailed thermodynamic structure of the hot X-ray emitting plasma from their cores to the virial radii, making comparisons of baryonic component in simulations to observations a strong cosmological probe. In this talk, I will review recent advances in our understanding of cluster astrophysics and discuss future prospects, opportunities and challenges for the use of galaxy clusters as a precision cosmological probe.","",""];

March[1]=["11","Peter Meszaros","Penn State","Gamma-ray Bursts: the standard model and beyond","I will review the recent ultra-bright GRB 130427A data and the puzzles (as well as non-puzzles) raised by its intepretation both in terms of the standard model and in terms of previous plausible extensions of this model. I then discuss the implications of the Icecube TeV neutrino non-detection of either this particular burst nor, so far, of the expected cumulative diffuse flux from many bursts, in terms of the standard model and the extended-standard model of the prompt emission, including photospheric and hadronic models. This is followed by a general discussion of the physics and issues behind the introduction of such extensions of the model, which have been motivated by the need to address the prompt gamma-ray spectra.","",""];

March[2]=["18","Daniel Eisenstein","Harvard","Measuring the Cosmic Distance Scale with SDSS-III","I will discuss how sound waves racing through the cosmos during the first million years of the Universe provide a robust method for measuring the low-redshift cosmological distance scale and thereby the properties of dark energy.  The distance that the sound can travel can be computed to high precision and creates a signature in the late-time clustering of matter that serves as a standard ruler.  Galaxy clustering results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and SDSS-III reveal this feature and allow us to measure distances to high accuracy, including a new 1% measurement to z=0.57.","",""];

March[3]=["25","Eli Waxman","Weizmann","IceCube's neutrinos: A new era in neutrino and cosmic-ray astrophysic","","",""];

April[0]=["1","Bhuvnesh Jain","U Penn","Lensing by Galaxies, Filaments and Voids","","",""];

April[1]=["8","Meg Urry","Yale University","Galaxy Evolution and the Growth of Supermassive Black Holes","Multiwavelength surveys like GOODS and COSMOS indicate that most actively growing black holes are heavily obscured, and this fraction increases in the young Universe and in lower luminosity AGN. Most black holes grow in moderate luminosity AGN, which dominate the X-ray .background,. rather than in luminous quasars. In the peak epoch of black hole growth, at z~1-3, such AGN are hosted in galaxies with significant disks, and thus cannot have undergone a recent major merger. Using morphological classifications from Galaxy Zoo (at z~0), we identify two distinct modes of galaxy evolution, with mergers and AGN feedback affecting only a minority.","",""];

April[2]=["15","Richard Ellis","Caltech","Observations of Star Forming Galaxies in the Heart of the Reionization Era","Deep exposures with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have provided the primary evidence that star-forming galaxies were present in the first billion years of cosmic history. Sometime during this early period the intergalactic medium transitioned from a neutral gas to one that is fully ionized. How did this `cosmic reionization' occur and were star-forming galaxies responsible? The electron scattering optical depth inferred from cosmic microwave background observations suggests that reionization occurred sometime in the redshift interval z=20 to z=6 so probing the abundance, luminosity distribution and spectral properties of galaxies during this uncharted period holds the key to addressing these fundamental questions. Recent imaging with HST's Wide Field Camera 3 in conjunction with Spitzer photometry and Keck spectroscopy has provided important new insight into understanding when reionization occurred and the role of early galaxies in the process.  I will review this progress and discuss the remaining challenges ahead of future facilities such as TMT and JWST.","",""];

April[3]=["22","Pavel Kroupa","Bonn","The Vast Polar Structures Around the Milky Way and Andromeda, and the Implications Thereof for Fundamental Physics","The current cosmological model rests on Einstein's theory of general relativity. In order for it to be consistent with large-scale structure data, the existence of cosmologically relevant physical processes need to be postulated: inflation, cold or warm dark matter particles and dark energy. Each of these is not well understood, but assuming the resulting standard mathematical description is a representation of cosmological reality, this representation can be tested in a different regime, namely on the scales of the Local Volume of galaxies down to individual galaxies. It is found that each test which has been designed shows the standard description to fail such that the currently standard model of cosmology is difficult to be upheld. In particular, the Dual-Dwarf-Galaxy Theorem, which must be true in the standard model, is falsified. The arrangement of satellite galaxies in rotating disk-like vast near-polar structures around both, the Milky Way and Andromeda, support this conclusion. As suggested by Milgrom, scale-invariant dynamics may be showing a new direction for the understanding of the astrophysics of galaxies. A successful final description of cosmology is yet to be found though.","",""];

April[4]=["29","Joshua A Frieman","Fermilab","Probing Cosmic Acceleration with the Dark Energy Survey","The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011 was awarded for the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Yet the physical origin of cosmic acceleration remains a mystery. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) aims to address the questions: why is the expansion speeding up? Is cosmic acceleration due to dark energy or does it require a modification of General Relativity? If dark energy, is it the energy density of the vacuum (Einstein's cosmological constant) or something else? DES is addressing these questions by measuring the history of cosmic expansion and of the growth of structure through four complementary techniques: galaxy clusters, the large-scale galaxy distribution, weak gravitational lensing, and supernovae. The DES collaboration has built a new, 570-megapixel, digital camera for the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to carry out a deep, wide-area sky survey of 300 million galaxies and a time-domain survey that will discover 3500 supernovae over 525 nights. I will overview the DES project, which achieved `first light' in September 2012 and which just finished its first survey season in early February 2014, and describe early science results.","",""];

May[0]=["6","Matt Holman","CfA","Confirming and Constraining Kepler Planets via Transit Timing Variations","Of the Kepler planets that have been reported to date, a significant fraction are in systems with multiple transiting planet.  In some cases, the signature of the gravitational interactions between planets in these systems can be seen in the variations of their times of transit. By carefully modeling the transit times, as well as investigating long-term stability, we are able to measure or constrain the masses and orbits of the transiting bodies in some of these systems, verifying that they are indeed planets. Although this approach is particularly effective for closely packed and near-resonant systems, it has also been applied to a broad range of systems. These include circumbinary planets, as well as systems with additional non-transiting planets. I review the process of using transit timing variations to confirm Kepler planets, highlighting some examples of dynamically interesting systems.","",""];

May[1]=["13","Shlomi Kotler","NIST","Quantum Information in experiments: there and back again","The field of experimental quantum information started with the first realization of an entangling gate in 1995. Tools originally developed for precision spectroscopy, turned out extremely useful for generating Bell pairs and storing quantum superposition states for seconds. At the level of very few quantum bits, we can quantum compute. A real large-scale quantum computer, however, is nowhere near to be found. We do not know how to scale the very few to the tens and hundreds. Yet.","",""];


September[0]=["16","","","","","",""];
September[1]=["23","","","","","",""];
September[2]=["30","","","","","",""];

October[0]=["7","","","","","",""];
October[1]=["14","","","","","",""];
October[2]=["21","","","","","",""];
October[3]=["28","","","","","",""];

November[0]=["4","","","","","",""];
November[1]=["11","","","","","",""];
November[2]=["18","","","","","",""];
November[3]=["25","","","","","",""];

December[0]=["2","","","","","",""];
December[1]=["9","","","","","",""];
December[2]=["16","","","","","",""];