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// ["Date","Name","Affiliation","Title","Abstract","Day","Time"]
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// Note: the format is as follows:
//September[0] =["20" ,"Name","Institution","Title","Abstract","",""];

//January[0] =["31" ,"No speaker","None","","","",""];
February[0] =["7" ,"Lindy Elkins-Tanton","Carnegie DTM","Planetary accretion and the rapid development of habitability","The final stages of the growth of a planet consist of violently energetic impacts, but new observations of the Moon and Mercury indicate that the energy of accretion does not remove all the water and carbon from the growing planet. Models demonstrate that rocky planets that accrete with as little as 0.01% water produce a massive steam atmosphere that collapses into a water ocean upon cooling. The low water contents required indicate that rocky planets may be generally expected to produce water oceans through this process, and that an Earth-sized planet would cool to clement conditions in just a few to tens of millions of years. These results indicate that most rocky planets in our solar system and rocky exoplanets are likely to have been habitable early in their evolution, increasing the likelihood of  life on the estimated 17 billion Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way.","",""];
February[1] =["14" ,"No speaker","None","","","",""];
February[2] =["21" ,"Peter Adshead","KICP","A Sinister Universe: Chromo-Natural Inflation and Magnetic Drift","I will describe a new, generic mechanism for realizing a period of slowly-rolling inflation through the use of an analog of 'magnetic drift.'  I will focus on a particular realization of this mechanism - Chromo-Natural Inflation - which consists of an axion coupled to non-Abelian gauge fields. The model's novel requirement is that the gauge fields begin inflation with a rotationally invariant vacuum expectation value (VEV) that is preserved through identification of SU(2) gauge invariance with rotations in three dimensions. The gauge VEV interacts with the axion leading to an attractor solution that exhibits slow-roll inflation even when the axion potential is steep.  I will show that the background gauge fields mediate parity-violating interactions in the action for the fluctuations leading to observable gravitational waves with a preferred handedness. ","",""];
February[3] =["28" ,"Adrienne Erickcek","CITA","The Dark Sector's First Minute.","I will demonstrate how we can gain powerful insights into the nature of dark matter and dark energy by investigating how they behave in the most energetic environment ever realized: the early Universe. First, I will show how the early Universe exposes a critical flaw in chameleon gravity, which is a scalar-tensor theory that provides dark energy while mimicking general relativity in the Solar System. The same mechanism that hides the chameleon scalar field makes that field roll when particles become nonrelativistic during the first minutes after the Big Bang. I will show that these 'kicks' to the chameleon field have catastrophic consequences for chameleon gravity. Second, I will describe how dark matter microhalos provide a window into the end of inflation and the subsequent transition to a radiation-dominated Universe. Specifically, we can use their abundances to study the density fluctuations that were created in the later stages of inflation, and the transition from inflation to a hot Universe can generate microhalos by enhancing the growth of small-scale density fluctuations. As relics from the first minutes after the Big Bang, these microhalos can provide new insights into the thermal history of the early Universe and the origins of dark matter.","",""];
March[0] =["7" ,"Anze Slosar","Brookhaven","Jungle News: BAO and Other Developments in the Lya-forest","","",""];
March[1] =["14" ,"Yue Shen","CfA","Some Thoughts on Measuring Quasar Black Hole Masses","","",""];
March[2] =["21" ,"Ed Spiegel","Columbia","The Source of Gravity in Newtonian and Relativistic Cosmology","There are two sides to every story and to most well constructed equations. In Poisson's equation and its generalization by Einstein we normally have on the left sides of those equations the descriptors of gravity and on the right its sources, matter in Newton's theory and energy (the stress-energy tensor, T, really) in Einstein's.  There have been several attempts to  make modifications on the right --- to the theory of gravity --- while the description of the sources has not been subjected to as much discussion.  This talk will describe a derivation of the stress-energy tensor from kinetic theory without introducing the Chapman-Enskog iterative procedure.  The derivation will be outlined for the nonrelativistic case and the result in the relativistic case will be reported afterwards.  The cosmological solutions (FRWL... and a second one) found with the relativistic version of T will be given along with an estimate of the entropy production in the second solution.","",""];
March[3] =["28" ,"Mark Krumholz","UCSC","The Physics of Radiatively-Driven Dusty Winds","Radiation pressure on dust grains may be an important mechanism in driving winds in a wide variety of astrophysical environments, from the envelopes of red giants to young star clusters to starburst galaxies to the tori around AGN. I outline a general theoretical framework for describing such winds, and I describe a series of numerical experiments that elucidate their properties. Using this framework, I derive strong limits on the potential impact of radiation pressure as a feedback mechanism in regulating star formation in galaxies.","",""];
April[0] =["4" ,"Josh Carter","CfA","Photodynamics: revealing the secrets of the lowest-mass planets and stars","Eclipsing systems are famous for providing abundant opportunities to study the basic properties of stars and planets --- but eclipsing systems with more than two bodies present truly extraordinary opportunities. This is because non-Keplerian effects can be observed and used to  determine precise masses, radii, and orbital details from first principles. With the Kepler space telescope, we have discovered hundreds of such systems, including circumbinary planets and triple star systems. Photometric-dynamical analyses  (photodynamics) have already provided precise masses and radii of the lowest mass stars (e.g. KOI-126, Kepler-16), greatly expanding our empirical knowledge of stars near the fully-convective boundary. We have also demonstrated the ability to precisely determine masses of rocky exoplanets (e.g. Kepler-36b) and have enabled detailed dynamical investigations into their orbital architectures. I will describe how my research is seeking to unveil the properties of scores of stars and planets in these currently unexplored domains. I will discuss how this work will clarify the formation, evolution and composition of rocky and even potentially habitable worlds.","",""];
April[1] =["11" ,"Matija Cuk","SETI Institute","Orbital Evolution of the Satellites of Saturn","Saturn's regular satellites exhibit a number of orbital anomalies, including the relatively high eccentricity of Titan, large inclination of Iapetus and surprisingly evolved Titan-Hyperion resonance. Recently, Lainey et al.(2012) reported a new analysis of Saturn moon astrometry going back decades and concluded that the tidal dissipation within Saturn is 10-20x faster than previously thought. I will discuss implications of this result for the history of the Saturnian system, with a focus on the past evolution of Titan.","",""];
April[2] =["18" ,"Andrea Ferrara","SNS, Pisa","Elusive, Rare, Hidden: First Stars","","",""];
April[3] =["25" ,"James Rhoads","ASU/IAS","Testing Reionization using Lyman Alpha Galaxies","Reionization was the last major phase transition for most of the normal matter in the universe, and a landmark event in the early phases of galaxy formation.   Lyman alpha emission from galaxies provides a good tool for probing reionization, because Lyman alpha is strongly scattered in a neutral intergalactic medium. Applications of this tool at redshift z=6.5 have shown that the IGM is largely ionized by then.  Recent work at z=7 has provided some evidence for neutral gas--- a result that is in tension with the results from microwave background polarization, and that would imply a very rapid evolution in the intergalactic medium between the two redshifts.   More definite signatures should in any case be expected from higher-redshift searches, which we are now pursuing at redshifts 8 and 9.   I will close by discussing prospects for definitive applications of Lyman-alpha reionization tests, both with wide-field ground based telescopes and with future space missions.","",""];
May[0] =["2" ,"Genevieve Graves","Princeton","Observing the Unobservable: Tracing Dark Matter Haloes and Galaxy Assembly","A fundamental challenge in cosmology and galaxy evolution is to understand how dark matter (DM) haloes influence the galaxies that form inside them.  Unfortunately, the parts of this process that we can simulate well—the growth of DM structures under the influence of gravity—cannot be observed directly, while the observable stars and gas are difficult to simulate over large scales because of the complicated physics involved.  My past research has focused on connecting the star formation histories of passive galaxies to their observed dynamical structure.  Here, I will present two projects that tackle different aspects of the larger problem of galaxy evolution.  The first is a new method for measuring weak gravitational lensing.  This method uses a photometry-only analog to the Fundamental Plane of early type galaxies in order to measure magnification due to weak lensing.  Combined with existing techniques based on gravitational shear, this method will produce the most direct measurements of dark matter haloes around ordinary galaxies, allowing us to connect observed galaxies with the dark matter haloes that host them.  The second project uses detailed, resolved galaxy kinematics and stellar population gradients in local massive galaxies to trace their assembly history.  The goal is to isolate contributions from /in situ/ star formation, major versus minor mergers, and the possible large-scale stripping of globular clusters.  I will present a pilot study of M87, which is the first of several dozen local galaxies we ultimately aim to analyze.","",""];
May[1] =["9" ,"Jacqueline van Gorkom","Columbia","A Pilot for a Very Large Array HI deep Field","Neutral atomic hydrogen is by far the most abundant element in galaxies. Although reasonably complete images of the HI sky exist out to redshifts of 0.08, we know surprisingly little about the HI properties of galaxies at larger redshifts.  This will change dramatically with the pending completion of the upgrade of the VLA and the construction of SKA pathfinders MeerKAT and ASKAP. Soon it will be possible to make in HI deep pencil beam surveys out to z=0.5.  To prepare for these new opportunities we have performed a pilot for an EVLA HI Deep Field, probing in one pointing (0.5 square degrees) all the HI at redshifts from 0 to 0.2.  I will motivate the science, present preliminary results and discuss future possibilities.","",""];
May[2]=["16","Masaaki Yamada","Princeton/PPPL","A Laboratory Study of Magnetic Reconnection: Recent discoveries on how it works and energizes plasma","(Rescheduled from Tuesday) Magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon of nature in which magnetic field lines change their topology in plasma and convert magnetic energy to particles by acceleration and heating. It is one of the most fundamental processes at work in laboratory and astrophysical plasmas (1). Magnetic reconnection occurs everywhere: in solar flares; coronal mass ejections; the earth’s magnetosphere; in the star forming galaxies; and in plasma fusion devices. This talk focuses on recent discoveries in the fundamental research of magnetic reconnection at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and its application to space astrophysical plasmas. We compare the experimental results from the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX) with those from theory and numerical simulations. The collaboration between space and laboratory scientists on reconnection research has recently reached a point where we can compare measurements of the reconnection layer profile in detail with support from numerical simulations. In spite of the huge difference in physical scales, we find remarkable commonalities in the features of the magnetic reconnection region in laboratory and space-astrophysical plasmas. (1) M. Yamada, R. Kulsrud, H. Ji, Rev. Mod. Phys., v.82, 602, (2010)","",""];
May[3] =["30" ,"Francis Halzen","Wisconsin","Evidence for High-Energy Extraterrestrial Neutrinos at the IceCube Detector","Construction and commissioning of the cubic-kilometer IceCube neutrino detector and its low energy extension DeepCore have been completed. The instrument detects neutrinos over a wide energy range: from 10 GeV atmospheric neutrinos to 1010 GeV cosmogenic neutrinos. We will describe initial results based on a subsample of the more than 300,000 neutrino events recorded during construction. We will emphasize the measurement of the high-energy atmospheric neutrino spectrum and the search for the still enigmatic sources of the Galactic and extragalactic cosmic rays. We will also discuss how the first data taken with the completed detector have revealed evidence for a flux of extraterrestrial neutrinos. ","",""];