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 »