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January[0] =["5" ,"Xuening Bai","Princeton University","Magnetorotational-Instability-Driven Accretion in Protoplanetary Disks","Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence driven by the magnetorotational instability (MRI) has long been considered as the most promising mechanism for transporting angular momentum in accretion disks. In protoplanetary disks (PPDs), however, the gas dynamics is strongly affected by non-ideal MHD effects such as Ohmic resistivity, Hall effect and ambipolar diffusion (AD) due to its weak ionization level. Most MRI calculations for PPDs done so far consider only the Ohmic resistivity, while Hall and AD effects dominate the surface and outer regions of PPDs but remain poorly explored. We perform 3D unstratified shearing-box MRI simulations with AD using a variety of magnetic field geometries and AD coefficients. We find that angular momentum transport becomes inefficient when the neutral-ion collision frequency falls below the orbital frequency. Moreover, sustained MRI turbulence requires weak magnetic field in the AD dominated regime. We present a general framework that incorporate these constraints together to predict the MRI-driven accretion rate and the corresponding magnetic field strength in PPDs. Our results indicate that MRI alone has difficulty in accounting for the observed accretion rate in a large fraction of PPDs, while angular momentum transport by magnetized wind may be a viable solution. On the other hand, for transitional disks, characterized by inner gaps or holes representing a later stage of PPD evolution, we find that MRI is able to drive sufficiently rapid accretion consistent with observations, and the presence of tiny grains even promotes accretion.","",""];
January[1] =["6" ,"Yingjie Peng","ETH","A Global Model for Galaxy Evolution: Simplicity and its Consequences","The galaxy population appears to be composed of infinitely complex different types and properties at first sight. However, when large samples of galaxies are studied, it appears that the vast majority of galaxies just follow simple scaling relations and similar evolutional modes while the outliers represent some minority. We demonstrate the astonishing underlying simplicities of the galaxy population emerged from large surveys and take a new approach to the topic of galaxy evolution and derive the analytical forms for the dominant evolutionary processes that control the galaxy evolution. This model successfully explained the observed evolution of the galaxy stellar mass functions (GSMF) of both passive and star-forming galaxies and the origin of the Schechter form of the GSMF. The model also offers natural explanations for the anti-hierarchical age-mass relation and the alpha-enrichment patterns for passive galaxies and makes many other testable predictions, such as the mass function of the population of transitory objects that are in the process of being quenched, the galaxy major- and minor-merger rates, the galaxy stellar mass assembly history, star formation history etc. Although still purely phenomenological, the model makes clear what the evolutionary characteristics of the relevant physical processes must in fact be. This model thus offers a new powerful analytical framework to study galaxy evolution and to explore a number of crucial issues and questions in galaxy evolution.","",""];
January[2] =["12" ,"Leslie Rogers","MIT","Liquid Water Oceans on Sub-Neptune Exoplanets","The presence of liquid water has been hypothesized as an important ingredient for planet habitability. A sub-Neptune mass planet with a liquid water ocean below a hydrogen-rich envelope is an intriguing prospect.  If the planet transits, its atmosphere could be amenable to characterization with transmission spectroscopy. A practical method to assess whether a transiting sub-Neptune planet could potentially harbor a liquid water ocean is needed. With interior structure models, I explore the conditions needed to reach pressures and temperatures conducive to liquid water at the planet surface. I apply this approach to constrain the prospects for liquid water oceans on GJ1214b and Kepler-22b.","",""];
February[0]=["2" ,"Joanne Cohn","Berkeley"," Galaxy Clusters: beyond spherical cows","The simple paradigm of a galaxy cluster as isolated, smooth and spherical leads to many useful results, both about clusters themselves and when using clusters for cosmological parameters and galaxy evolution. A high resolution large volume dark matter simulation will be used to characterize some of the departures (the cosmic web, galaxy substructure) from these cluster idealities, their relations to each other, and some of the consequences for cluster galaxies, observed cluster masses, and beyond.","",""];
February[1]=["9" ,"Christoph Mordasini","MPIA Heidelberg","Planetary Population Synthesis: Comparing Planet Formation Theory and Observation","The last few years have seen a tremendous increase of observational data regarding the properties of extrasolar planets. High precision radial velocity and transit observations have yielded large datasets which are important to improve our understanding of planet formation and evolution. But also other techniques like microlensing or direct imaging start to contribute information regarding other basic properties of the extrasolar planets. Bringing all these different dataset into one coherent picture to improve our theoretical understanding is challenging, as each technique is constraining a different aspect of the formation and evolution process. I will present planetary population synthesis as a useful method in this context as it allows many direct comparisons of theoretical results with observational data. For the synthesis, we use a planetary formation model which is based on the core accretion paradigm, but includes also disk migration and disk evolution. By varying the initial conditions of the model according to observed distributions of properties  of protoplanetary disk (e.g. disk mass or lifetime) we synthesize planetary populations. Recently, we have extended this formation model into a self-consistently coupled formation and evolution model. Thanks to this it is now possible to compare a synthetic and the actual observed planetary population in all major characteristics, namely in their mass, semimajor axis, radius and luminosity distributions. As an application, I will show comparisons with transit observations concerning the synthetic and the observed radius distribution, the semimajor axis distribution of planets close to the star, and the mass-radius relationship. We find that the latter can only be reproduced if strongly reduced grain opacities are assumed during the formation process, establishing an interesting link between microphysical processes like grain growth during formation and observable quantities nowadays. I will finally make predictions for the luminosity distribution of massive planets for future direct imaging searches.","",""];
February[2]=["16","Simon Portegies Zwart","Leiden University","The Astronomical Multipurpose Software Environment and the Ecology of Star Clusters","Star cluster ecology is the field of research where stellar evolution, gravitational dynamics, hydrodynamcs and the background potential dynamics of the parent galaxy interact to a complex non-linear evolution of self gravitating stellar systems. I will review the processes related to the ecology of stellar clusters, discuss the numerical hurdles and the physical principles. In addition, I will introduce the AMUSE framework with which we are performing simulations of the ecology of stellar clusters. AMUSE is a general purpose framework for interconnecting existing scientific software with a homogeneous and unified interface.  Since the framework is based on the standard message passing interface any production ready code that is written in a language that supports its native bindings can be incorporated, in addition our framework is intrinsically parallel and it conveniently separates the all the numerical solvers in memory. The strict separation also enables the possibility to realize unit conversion between the different modules and to recover from fatalities in a unified and structured way. The time spend in the framework is relatively small, and for production simulations we measured an overhead of at most 10\%, which in our case is acceptable. Due to the unified structure of the interface incorporating new modules which address the same physics is relatively straightforward. The time stepping between the codes can be simply consecutive or realized via a mixed variable symplectic method in which the Hamiltonian of the problem is solved in separate steps and combined via a Verlet-leapfrog integration scheme.  In our experience with an implementation for multiphysics simulations in astrophysics we encounter relatively few problems with the strict separation in methods, and the results of our test simulations are consistent with earlier results that use a monolithic framework.","",""];
February[3]=["23","Enrico Pajer","Princeton","A New Window on Primordial Non-Gaussianity","We know very little about primordial curvature perturbations on scales smaller than about a Mpc. I review how u-type distortion of the Cosmic Microwave Background spectrum provides the unique opportunity to probe these scales over the unexplored range from 50 to 104 Mpc-1. This is a very clean probe, in that it relies only on well-understood linear evolution. While #-distortion by itself can constrain the amount of power on small scales, correlations between #-distortion and temperature anisotropies can be used to test Gaussianity. In particular the #T cross correlation is proportional to the very squeezed limit of the primordial bispectrum and hence measures fNLloc, while ## is proportional to the primordial trispectrum and measures tauNL. A simple Fisher matrix forecast shows that already with current technologies an interesting bound Delta f_NL  10^3 could be achieved. Remarkably #-distortion has an extremely small cosmic variance, which in principle allows one to improve this bound by six orders of magnitude.","",""];
March[0]   =["1" ,"Tim Merlis","Princeton","The climate and atmospheric circulation of Earth-like exoplanets","I present the results of atmospheric general circulation modelling experiments for Earth-like planets in tidally locked configurations.  The factors controlling the atmospheric circulation, which transports heat from the day side to the night side, are analyzed in light of basic scaling arguments and the mechanistic understanding that has been developed in the study of Earth's atmosphere. Inspired by habitability implications, I examine the simulated surface climate for a range of rotation periods and solar constants.","",""];
March[1]   =["8" ,"Dustin Lang","Princeton","The Tractor: Using Forward Modeling to Measure Objects in Astronomical Images","I will present some early results from the Tractor, a new approach for measuring astronomical sources in collections of images that David Hogg (NYU) and I have been developing. The idea to use generative (forward) modeling: we want to produce an astronomical source catalog that, along with image calibration information, allows us to predict the image pixels that were actually observed. If we have multiple images (in multiple bands, or from multiple instruments, say), we can optimize the source catalog to jointly best explain the observed images. Unlike traditional methods, we never have to co-add, degrade or reject any of the images, and by sampling we can capture the covariance in our measurements.","",""];
March[2]   =["15","Kfir Blum","IAS","Asymmetric Higgsino Dark Matter","In the supersymmetric framework, a higgsino asymmetry exists in the universe before the electroweak phase transition. We investigate whether the higgsino is a viable asymmetric dark matter candidate. We find that this is indeed possible. The gauginos, squarks and sleptons must all be very heavy, such that the only electroweak-scale superpartners are the higgsinos. The temperature of the electroweak phase transition must be in the (1-10) GeV range.","",""];
March[3]   =["22","Stefano Profumo","UCSC","The Electro-Weak Scale: Key to the Origin of Visible and Dark Matter","New physics at the electro-weak scale might unlock the mysteries of the generation of the (baryonic) matter-antimatter asymmetry and of the particle nature of dark matter. I will review recent progress on understanding baryogenesis at the electro-weak phase transition, and the multitude of experimental tests that this scenario offers, including collider, gravity waves and electric dipole moment searches. I will argue that this scenario is firmly falsifiable, with a time-line of only a few years. I will then discuss searches for weak-scale particle dark matter in astrophysical data, including an updated review of controversial signals in cosmic-ray and gamma-ray data. I will address the question of whether it is feasible to learn about New Physics from the Sky, and outline theoretical and observational strategies for a roadmap towards the discovery of the nature of dark matter.","",""];
March[4]   =["29","Raphael Flauger","IAS","Phenomenology of Axion Monodromy Inflation","","",""];
April[0]   =["5" ,"Dong Lai","Cornell","Dynamical Tides in Binaries: Merging White Dwarfs, Kepler KOI-54 and Hot Jupiter Systems","Dynamical tides, involving the excitation and dissipation of waves and oscillation modes, play an important role in many different binary systems. I will discuss recent works on dynamical tides in three types of systems: (i) Compact white dwarf binaries undergoing orbital decay due to gravitational radiation; (ii) An eccentric main-sequence star binary exhibiting tidally induced oscillations; (iii) Exoplanetary systems containing hot Jupiters and misaligned host stars.","",""];
April[1]   =["12","Jordi Miralda Escude","Barcelona","Large-scale Structure with the Lyman-Alpha Forest from BOSS","The first results obtained from the Baryon acoustic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey in SDSS-III on large-scale structure using the Lyman alpha forest will be discussed. Thanks to the unprecedentedly large numbers of quasar spectra being obtained by BOSS, absorption spectra are emerging as a powerful tool for the study of the large-scale distribution and cross-correlations of hydrogen, galaxies, QSOs, and metal absorbers in the universe. This promises to provide new clues for fundamental cosmology, the nature of quasars, the relation of galaxies to their environment, and the first metals that were released to the intergalactic medium.","",""];
April[2]   =["19","Doug Lin","UC Santa Cruz","Origin, Evolution, and Destiny of Close-in Planets","Planetary astrophysics is the most exciting and fastest growing branch of astronomy today.  New data obtained from systematic radial velocity surveys and Kepler transit surveys have led to the discovery of over 700 planets and 3000 additional candidates, many of which are multiple systems.  Although their presence is ubiquitous around nearby stars, their kinematic and structure properties appear to be diverse. Based on these rich data, I will present some theoretical analyses which may enable us to extract information about their origin, evolution, and structure.  I will discuss the process of planet migration in evolving protostellar disks, the interaction of stellar magnetic fields with protostellar disks and close-in planets, tidal evolution of close-in companions, the potential retention of volatile elements and loss of atmosphere. These effects are incorporated into population synthesis models and the construction of scenarios for the retention of close-in planets and the observed obliquity between stellar spins and planet's orbits.","",""];
April[3]   =["26","Zhaohuan Zhu","Princeton","Planet-disk interaction: from theories to observations","The interaction between young planets and the gaseous protoplanetary disks from which they form leads to planet migration, gas accretion, and gap opening, each of which can significantly affect exoplanet demographics. Although most previous studies model the gas as a highly viscous disk, in reality protoplanetary disks are nearly inviscid, but strongly turbulent due to the magnetorotational instability (MRI). We have carried out large scale magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations to study planet-disk interaction in inviscid but turbulent disks. We revisit the planet gap opening process, and find significant differences between viscous and MRI-turbulent disks. Furthermore, treating the thermal physics more accurately reveals a strong coupling between the planet's gravitational potential and buoyancy waves, which can affect both migration and gap opening. Observationally, recent near-IR spectroscopy, scattered light images, and sub-mm interferometry reveal gaps in protoplanetary disks. These observations, for the first time, put stringent limits on current planet-disk interaction theories. By comparing current theories with observations, we realize another important physics, widely ignored to date, is the dust dynamics in disks. Our recent developments on this problem will also be summarized.  ","",""];
May[0]     =["3" ,"Helmut Hofer","IAS","Hamiltonian Dynamics and Symplectic Invariants","","",""];

// Let's keep those free for now.
May[1]     =["10","Lucianne Walkowicz","Princeton","New Light on Stellar Astrophysics with Kepler","Stellar magnetic activity leads to a variety of observable effects, from star spots that modulate the stellar brightness on the order of weeks to months, to flares, which release highly energetic radiation over the course of a few hours. Much of our understanding of these phenomena comes from observations of the sun, where surface spatial resolution and high time cadence afford us rich detail unavailable for other stars. As studies of stellar spots and flares tend to sample stars that are extremely active, much more so than our sun, our pictures of solar and stellar cover different regimes and are not yet congruous. The Kepler mission has now obtained nearly three years of precise photometry for stars both like our sun and considerably different from it. Although Kepler's main goal is the discovery of exoplanets, it has made unprecedented contributions to stellar astrophysics. These new data offer a new chance to not only understand the stars themselves, but to understand the range of circumstellar habitats in which planets exist. In this talk, I will discuss our ongoing work to characterize the variability due to starspots, stellar rotation and flares in the Kepler planet host stars and the larger sample of targets as a whole.","",""];
May[2]     
//May[3]     =["24","(local speaker)","","","","",""];
June[0]      =["14","Neal Dalal","UIUC","Dark Matter Halos","","",""];
June[1]     =["19 (NOTE: This is a Tuesday.)" ,"Willy Kley","Tuebingen","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.  ","",""];
June[2]      =["21","Glenn van de Ven","MPIA","Correlation between black hole masses and bulge luminosities not fundamental","The correlation between the masses of central supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and the bulge luminosity of their host galaxies ---the SMBH-bulge relation--- is seen as fundamental to understand the formation and (co-)evolution of SMBHs and galaxies, as well as to predict SMBH masses at high(er) redshifts. With the aim to refine and extend the SMBH-bulge relation, we obtained very deep and high-resolution near-infrared images of 35 galaxies with secure stellar dynamically measured SMBH masses. After performing in-depth image decompositions, we not only find ambiguities in the definition and hence also inferred luminosities of the bulges, but also that the SMBH masses correlate equally well with the total luminosity of galaxies. Moreover, while the slope of the BH-bulge relation varies when selecting subsets of different types of galaxies, the one-to-one relation with total luminosity is robust. In an other ongoing effort, we have obtained long-slit spectra of well over 600 nearby galaxies for which the resulting combination of stellar velocity dispersion and (redshift) distance allows us to predict the SMBH sphere-of-influence. Next, we plan to request for expensive follow-up high-spatial resolution spectroscopy for those with sphere-of-influences large enough to dynamically measure the SMBH mass. In the meantime, we found 6 compact galaxies with half-light radii of only~2 kpc, disk-like rotation and in particular very high dispersions reaching 400 km/s in their centers. The availability of HST imaging for one of the six allowed us to construct Schwarzschild orbit-based dynamical models that require a 17+/-3 billion solar mass SMBH to fit the data, while the total stellar mass of the galaxy is only 120 billion solar masses. This SMBH-to-total mass fraction of 12% is at least two orders of magnitude higher than expected from the SMBH-bulge relation. If the other compact galaxies host similar uebermassiv SMBHs, it would be another indication that the BH-bulge relation is not fundamental.","",""];