Abstract: In 2012 the ATLAS and CMS experiments discovered the Higgs Boson, firmly establishing the Standard Model as the dominant paradigm for subatomic particle interactions. Many expected the Higgs discovery to be one of several discoveries at the energy frontier, …
Abstract: The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument is a multi-object spectrograph composed of a wide field corrector, a 5000 robotically positioned fiber system, and 10 3-arms spectrographs. The instrument is installed this year on the Mayall 4-m diameter telescope at Kitt …
The International System of Units (SI) is expected to undergo a revolutionary change on May 20, 2019. In October 2017, the International Committee on Weights and Measures met at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris and recommended …
Peter Mohr (NIST) "The New SI and Fundamental Constants" Read More »
Recent progress in cosmological observations reveal a simple yet strange universe. Our preferred cosmological model relies on mysterious components such as Dark Matter, Dark Energy and an early period of accelerated expansion. The challenge in the next decade will be …
Simone Ferraro (LBNL) "Lighting up the Dark Universe" Read More »
From 2009 to 2014, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) used the SDSS telescope to obtain spectra of 1.5 million galaxies to get very accurate measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) scale at redshift z ~0.5. At the same …
ABSTRACT: The recent observations of gravitational waves have been enabled by a new generation of LIGO detectors, Advanced LIGO, the most sensitive laser interferometers ever built. In my talk I will review the main scienctific results from the first two …
Lisa Barsotti (MIT) "Squeezing the most out of gravitational wave detectors" Read More »
With WIMP-nucleon scattering limits approaching the neutrino floor, and coherent neutrino-nucleon scattering experimentally established, there is renewed interest in directional detectors as a means to penetrate the neutrino floor. The CYGNUS collaboration aims to deploy multiple gas Time Projection Chambers …
We have played with SDSS spectra for almost two decades and enjoyed performing all sorts of statistical analyses with them. In this talk we will take a critical look at these explorations and discuss what has worked well and what …
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) remains a key source from which to extract information about fundamental physics, due to its clean, well-understood origin and immense constraining power on many types of new physics. The next decade of CMB observations will …
Abstract: Though dismissed by most, we claim that strong gravitational lensing of the gravitational waves for merging black holes explains the high mass binary black hole mergers observed by LIGO/Virgo explains the apparent 30 M_Sun events better than any alternative …