// Enter speaker information here. The format is:
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// ["Date","Name","Affiliation","Title","Abstract","Day","Time"]
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// In the Abstract field you must escape double quotes (\"). Some HTML
// is possible (like <br>, <b>, etc.).
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// ** Edited to add color change for special day/time.
// ** If Day or Time field is not empty, special day/time
// ** is/are added in date column in red.
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// Note: the format is as follows:
//September[0] =["20" ,"Name","Institution","Title","Abstract","",""];

September[0] = ["11","Thomas Greif","Harvard","The formation of the first stars","One of the final frontiers in modern cosmology is the formation of the first stars at the end of the cosmic dark ages, when the Universe transitioned from its simple initial state to one of ever increasing complexity. I will discuss how the first bound gas clouds condensed out of the smallest dark matter halos, ultimately leading to the formation of the first stars. State of the art numerical simulations are our method of choice, showing that their formation is similarly complex to star formation today. Their radiative, mechanical and chemical feedback influences the formation of the first galaxies, and results in a highly turbulent and multi-phase interstellar medium accompanying the second step of hierarchical structure formation. These objects are the targets of the next generation of ground and space-based telescopes, which can probe the Universe when it was only a few hundred million years old.","",""];
September[1] = ["18","Nick Stone","Columbia","Tidal Disruption of Stars by Supermassive Black Holes: Rates, Rotation, and Relativity.","Stars are tidally disrupted by supermassive black holes when they are scattered onto low-pericenter orbits in distant galactic nuclei.  Accretion of the bound debris results in a multiwavelength flare with bolometric luminosity comparable to or higher than a Type II supernovae.  Despite decades of theoretical study and increasingly frequent observations (10-20 strong candidate events exist), many aspects of tidal disruption events (TDEs) remain unclear.  I will describe my recent work on the dynamics of tidal disruption, which demonstrated that the traditional literature overestimated the peak luminosities of these flares (sometimes by orders of magnitude), and also showed that general relativistic precession can play a crucial role in circularizing eccentric tidal debris.  I will also discuss ongoing work to estimate the rates of TDEs in realistic galactic nuclei, and the usefulness of TDE samples for constraining the uncertain SMBH occupation fraction in low mass galaxies.","",""];
September[2] = ["25","Takeshi Kobayashi","CITA","Generating and Constraining Primordial Magnetic Fields","Large-scale magnetic fields exist in cosmic structures such as galaxies and galaxy clusters. Moreover, recent gamma ray observations have suggested the existence of magnetic fields even in void regions. In this talk I will explain how such large-scale magnetic fields can be generated in the early universe. In particular, I will discuss the possibility of cosmological magnetogenesis in the post-inflationary universe, when the inflaton oscillates around its potential minimum and the universe is effectively dominated by cold matter. I will also present a new way of constraining magnetogenesis models from the Schwinger effect. Electric fields generated along with the magnetic fields induce large conductivity in the universe via the Schwinger effect, posing a major challenge for magnetic field generation, especially for the conventional inflationary magnetogenesis models.","",""];
October[0]   = ["2","Kartik Sheth","NRAO","Reconstructing the Mass Assembly of Galaxy Disks over the last 12 Billion Years with ALMA, HST and Spitzer","Bars are a key signpost in the evolutionary history of a disk galaxy. When a disk is sufficiently massive, dynamically cold and rotationally supported, and sufficient time has elapsed for the baryonic matter to exchange energy and angular momentum with the dark matter halo or the outer disk, the formation of a bar is inevitable.  Therefore understanding the evolution of the bar fraction as a function of the host galaxy properties and as a function of redshift provides important clues to the evolutionary history of galaxies.  I will present the latest results on local bars from the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G) and discuss the observations for the declining bar fraction with redshift from the COSMOS survey.  A plausible reason for the decline in the bar fraction may be that galaxy disks were too dynamically hot to host bars at higher redshift which we have investigated using the DEEP2 / AEGIS data. Together these data are beginning to provide a coherent and consistent picture for the assembly history of disks on the Hubble sequence. The star formation in these disks is also now being understood with the latest results from ALMA.  I will show the latest results on the cosmological evolution of the molecular gas content in a mass-selected sample of galaxies at three epochs, z=2.2, z=1, and z=0.3 and discuss planned Cycle 1 observations of the molecular gas environment in the prototypical barred spiral NGC 1097.","",""];
October[1]   = ["9","Michael Fall","STScI","Formation and Evolution of Star Clusters: A Simple, Unified Picture","This talk presents a simple, unified picture for the formation and evolution of star clusters.  These objects are important in the structure and evolution of galaxies, primarily as the sites of star formation and stellar feedback.  The talk is organized around the mass function of star clusters (i.e., the spectrum of cluster masses) and how it evolves with time (age).  Observations show some remarkable similarities in the mass functions of young star clusters in different galaxies, analogous to the similarities in stellar initial mass functions (IMFs).  Explaining the near universality of the mass functions of star clusters is one of the goals and successes of the theory presented here.  A byproduct of this theory is a unified concept of star clusters of all types:  associations, open clusters, globular clusters, etc.  This traditional nomenclature has little physical content and should be abandoned.  In the new picture, clusters are characterized simply by their masses and ages.  The talk is aimed at a broad audience of theorists and observers, students and professors.","",""];
October[2]   = ["16","Brian Farris","Columbia/NYU","Disk Accretion onto Supermassive Black Hole Binaries","Binary black hole mergers in the presence of gaseous accretion flows are prime candidates for simultaneous observations of both gravitational waves and electromagnetic signals. I will present the results of 2D hydrodynamical simulations of circumbinary disk accretion using the finite-volume, moving mesh code DISCO. These simulations demonstrate that gas is efficiently stripped from the inner edge of the circumbinary disk and enters the cavity along accretion streams, which feed persistent “mini-disks” surrounding each black hole. I will discuss characteristic periodicity in the measured accretion rate onto each BH, as well as the dependence of the accretion flow on the binary mass ratio. I will also discuss characteristic modifications to the spectrum which arise from shock heated gas inside the circumbinary cavity. Finally, I will discuss simulations which include binary inspiral and merger due to gravitational wave emission in order to track the changes in the accretion as the orbit shrinks.","",""];
October[3]   = ["23","Zigmund Kermish","Princeton","The POLARBEAR experiment: First season results on sub-degree scales and future plans","POLARBEAR is a millimeter wave polarimeter operating from 5,200 meters in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The instrument's 3.5 arcminute beam enables measurements of the polarized cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing signal. After briefly reviewing the instrument, I present results from our first season of observations, including the first measurements of the B-mode polarization power spectrum. I conclude by outlining future plans for the POLARBEAR experiment and the next generation POLARBEAR-2 and Simons Array experiments.","",""];
October[4]   = ["30","Dave Tsang","McGill","Shedding Light on Planet-Disk Interactions","The new era of exoplanetary discovery has begun to allow a statistical understanding of planetary distributions to inform our knowledge of planet formation and migration. These data now allow us to start inferring the relative importance of various dynamical processes. I will discuss a few features of these emerging statistical distributions, and possible mechanisms to produce such features, focussing particularly on disk-planetinteractions. I will discuss how wave resonance may affect the distribution of close-in planets, as well as how the 'Eccentricity Valley' in the exoplanet distribution around metal-poor stars may be a signature of an eccentricity excitation process related to stellar insolation of giant planets.","",""];
November[0]  = ["6","Ruth Murray-Clay","UCSB","Sculpting Exoplanet Atmospheres: A Framework for Thermal Escape","","",""];
November[1]  = ["13","Olek Sadowski","MIT","Powerful radiatively driven jets in super-critical accretion flows","If only there is enough mass near the black hole, accretion rate can easily exceed the Eddington limit. Tidal disruption events and mergers of supermassive black holes in the early Universe are good candidates. Such accretion flows are studied numerically with radiation magnetohydrodynamical codes. In this talk I will describe simulations performed in general relativity with code KORAL. I will show that the isotropic equivalent luminosities for observer looking almost perpendicular along the axis can be as large as 10^46 - 10^47 erg/s for a 1e5 Msun non-rotating black hole. Implications of this fact will be discussed.","",""];
November[2]  = ["20","Adrienne Erickcek","U NCarolina","Using microhalos to probe the origins of dark matter.","The expansion history of the Universe prior to Big Bang nucleosynthesis is unknown.  This ignorance profoundly limits our understanding of dark matter: we cannot calculate its relic abundance without knowing when the Universe became radiation dominated.  Fortunately, there is another probe of the early Universe that could break this degeneracy.  I will show how an effectively matter-dominated era prior to the onset of nucleosynthesis can radically enhance the population of microhalos for both thermal and nonthermal dark matter.  I will then discuss how the resulting abundance of substructure affects the dark matter annihilation rate, which opens up the possibility of using gamma-ray observations to learn about the reheating of the Universe and the origins of dark matter.","",""];
November[3]  = ["27 (Thanksgiving)","","","","","No Seminar",""];
December[0]  = ["4","Kris Sigurdson","UBC","Gravity and the Search for New Particle Interactions with Cosmology","","",""];
December[1]  = ["11","Martin Pessah","Niels Bohr Institute","On the Dynamics of Helium in the Dilute Intracluster Medium","Understanding whether Helium can sediment to the core of galaxy clusters is important for a number of problems in cosmology and astrophysics. For example, our ignorance in the distribution of Helium leads to systematic uncertainties in estimating the density and masses of galaxy clusters. All current models addressing this question are one-dimensional, and ignore the fact that the intracluster medium is a dilute, magnetized plasma, which can effectively channel ions and electrons, leading to anisotropic transport of momentum, heat, and particle diffusion. This anisotropy can lead to a wide variety of instabilities, which could be relevant for understanding the dynamics of the heterogeneous medium. I will present the results of recent analytical and numerical studies analyzing a wide spectrum of instabilities, that feed off thermal and composition gradients in a magnetized tenuous plasma, such as the ICM. I will discuss the future prospects of studying the long term evolution of Helium sedimentation in more realistic settings.","",""];
December[2]  = ["18","","","","","",""];