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 …

Julien Guy (LBNL) "The DESI Project, Construction Status and Prospects for Precise Cosmological Distance Measurements with Lyman-Alpha Forests" Read More »

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 …

Andreu Font (U. College London) – "Cosmology with the Lyman alpha forest: challenges and opportunities”" Read More »

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 …

Sven Vahsen (University of Hawaii) – Directional Dark Matter Searches via Charge Cloud Tomography Read More »

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 …

Brice Menard (JHU) and Ting-Wen Lan (IPMU) – Twenty years of SDSS spectra: lessons for DESI Read More »

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 …

Colin Hill (IAS) – "Fundamental Physics from the Foreground-Obscured Microwave Sky: Inflation, Neutrino Masses, and Beyond" Read More »

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 …

George Smoot (UCB/LBNL) "Reinterpreting Low Frequency LIGO/Virgo Events as Gravitationally-Lensed Magnified Stellar-Mass Black Hole Mergers at Cosmological Distances" Read More »

The current models for HL-LHC computing show order-of-magnitude resource shortages with large uncertainties. Business-as-usual is not an option unless we accept limiting HL-LHC physics reach, particularly for precision studies. A  grassroots initiative called the HEP Software Foundation has been collecting ideas and …

Paolo Calafiura (LBNL) HL-LHC Computing Challenges Read More »