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 »

We analyse two-Higgs-Doublet extensions of the Standard Model, paying special attention to novel mechanisms for natural suppression of scalar Flavor-Changing-Neutral-Currents and their imllementation in specific models. Some of the most salient implications of these models will be presented. The possibility …

Gustavo Branco (CFTP-IST, Univ. de Lisboa, Portugal) – "Multi-Higgs Models, The Flavor Problem and the Origin of CP Violation" Read More »

Abstract: The Belle experiment in Japan began taking data in the late 1990’s and went on to record the world’s largest sample of B-anti-B meson pairs produced in a quantum correlated state. This initial state allowed Belle, and the BaBar …

Alan Schwartz (University of Cincinnati) "Challenging the Standard Model with the Belle(II) Experiment" Read More »

ABSTRACT: I will discuss the event generator GENEVA, which for the first time combines fixed order and resummed perturbative calculations with parton showering and hadronization. I will explain the basic physics concepts underlying GENEVA, and show how they can be …

Christian Bauer (LBNL) "GENEVA: Combining perturbative calculations with parton showers" Read More »

Abstract: Recent measurements of the Hubble Constant (H_0) through distance ladder techniques have revealed a noticeable tension with the Planck H_0 value that was obtained under the assumption of the cosmological "standard model", i.e., a flat Lambda cold dark matter …

Chris Fassnacht (UC Davis) "Cosmological parameters from strong gravitational lenses" Read More »