KITP
catdynamics | August 26, 2013The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics is currently holding a "Rapid Response Workshop" on Black Holes: Complementarity, Fuzz, or Fire?, August 19-30.
Organizers: Raphael Bousso (UCB), Samir Mathur (OSU), Rob Myers (PI), Joe Polchinski (KITP), Lenny Susskind (Stanford)
The lunch talk today is Lenny Susskind "Inside Black Holes"
That talk will be available on video, audio and podcast feeds soon
The general session talks from the Fuzz, or Fire are available as they become available at the link above.
catdynamics | August 12, 2013Is the general audience "black board" talk at KITP today, giving an overview of the quantitative approches to morphogenesis program currently unverway.
Symmetry breaking and mechanics.
The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics runs parallel programs and currently there is a biophysics program New Quantitative Approaches to Morphogenesis concurrent with the astrophysics program on A Universe of Black Holes
During each multi-week program there is a black board lunch talk, for all members of KITP, giving an overview of the theme of the program or some key aspect of it. The talk is intended to…
catdynamics | August 9, 2013Final day of the "A Universe of Black Holes" workshop with a session: "Modeling Black Hole Accretion and Outflows" - all MHD sims today...
Chris Reynolds (Univ. of Maryland) starts with - The temporal variability of model accretion disks
Had to miss this. Go check it online, Chis gives fab talks.
Julian Krolik (JHU) "The Bardeen-Petterson effect in magneto-hydrodynamics"
Krolik demonstrated large Reynolds stress...
cf " Alignment of supermassive black hole binary orbits and spins" - Miller & Krolik 2013
Jim Stone (Princeton) "New magneto-hydrodynamic simulations of radiation pressure…
catdynamics | August 8, 2013The workshop on Massive Black Holes at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics continues with today's session on "Co-evolution of black holes and their host galaxies".
I continue a semi-liveblog of the proceedings.
As before, talks are online here - podcast, audio and video options; pdfs of talk slides added as speakers get them in.
First up is Yohan Dubois (IAP / Oxford Univ.) - on "AGN feedback in adaptive mesh refinement cosmological simulations" - high res AMR simulations of massive gas rich halos at z ~ 5-6
make some assumptions about SMBH formation and accretion efficiency on small…
catdynamics | August 7, 2013We are back to "Massive Black Holes"
Happy Birthday Alberto!
Alberto Sesana (AEI) leads off with "Probing massive black holes with space-based interferometry and pulsar timing"
starts with overview of gravitational radiation - characteristic frequencies, amplitudes, timescales
Baby Black Holes - up for adoption, get collectible adoption certificates with a picture of your very own baby black hole, or one much like it
- this is eLISA's plan for fundraising...
Ed - ok it is real it is an etsy thing and they are ***adorable***
quick pitch for eLISA/NGO
Ed: New improved eLISA web page - see…
catdynamics | August 6, 2013the Massive Black Holes workshop at KITP continues, with another Black Hole Pairs session
Mike Eracleous kicks off: Observational Searches for Close Supermassive Binary Black Holes
emission line signatures of close (~ sub-parsec) supermassive binary black holes
cf "A Large Systematic Search for Recoiling and Close Supermassive Binary Black Holes"
and "Emission Lines as a Tool in Search for Supermassive Black Hole Binaries and Recoiling Black Holes"
look for single line emitters, broad emission line displaced from narrow emission lines - displacement is ~ 1,000 km/sec
orbital periods of…
catdynamics | August 6, 2013"Massive black hole pairs" is the topic of today's session at the BHOLES13 workshop at KITP
Talks are online here - note that slides of talks show up later as speakers get their act together and send in slides
Monica Colpi (Milan) starts the session with Formantion of Binary Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei
starts off with good summary of "last parsec" problem and why it is a bit of a red herring
followed by discussion of role of gas at late stage of mergers and summary of sims
new trendy things to do is to look at star formation in situ in outer accretion disks - something must happen, but it…
catdynamics | August 5, 2013and we are back from lunch
J. Johnson (LANL) talking about supermassive stars as seeds for supermassive black holes - going to be getting more technical
supermassive star has a gas mass ~ 105 solar masses (as oppesed to few hundredish solar masses for standard Pop III stars that could provide low mass seeds)
form later than Pop III - maybe ~ 4-500 Myr after Big Bang
something like that may be needed for observed high luminosity quasars at redshift > 6.
radiative feedback, still not doing it right
but are we they doing it well enough...?
argues supermasive star formation common at z ~ 8-12…
catdynamics | August 5, 2013Visiting lovely KITP for the A Universe of Black Holes programme, and specifically the associated "Massive Black Holes: Birth, Growth and Impact" workshop.
As usual the talks will (eventually) be posted on line, both slides and web, but in the mean time I will be semi-transcribing my semi-coherent stream-of-consciousness thoughts on the issues.
And we are off, with new KITP Director Lars Bildsten welcoming the hordes.
As is typical, about half the attendees are noobs and have not visited KITP before.
Are they in for a treat.
Marta Volonteri (IAP), one of the workshop organizers, leads off…
catdynamics | August 12, 2011Not infrequently, I get asked what it is I do, anyway, as a scientisty sort of person.
I blogged it, of course, but that was a "typical day" - during term time and filled with paperwork and class prep and general rushing about.
This morning I woke up and found the Sb Overlords had frontpaged this quote:
"I think I need to go back and think about adaptive load balancing block solving of sparse, nasty almost diagonal matrices; that and whether kinetic energy turbulence really affects sound wave propagation (duh, of course it does, but how much...)?"
Huh?
Ah, Particle Physics snark...
So, how…
catdynamics | August 11, 2011Summary of results on Higgs particle on LHC workshop at KITP
I wasn't here for it, but last week John Conway presented theLHC Higgs Searches (slides, audio, video)
summary talk at the LHC11 workshop.
I had, of course, kept half an eye on the flurry of conference announcement on the preliminary LHC constraints on various wished for particles and sparticles, but it is particularly satisfying to see a good summary presentation.
Low mass joint Higgs constraints - more data needed (from Conway's talk, link above)
So, there is space in the parameter space, there are a few little gaps in the 200-…
catdynamics | August 11, 2011hangin' out at KITP sneaking into the LHC workshop talks,
sort of liveblog of the constraints on supersymmetry from preliminary LHC results.
today's seminar is Reece: on Assessing SUSY After 1 fb-1 (blackboard talk, but audio/video will be up on the website soon) on constraints on supersymmetry from current LHC data, good turnout, serious punditry in the audience
basically: should LHC have seen superpartners by now, or ought it to see it real soon now?
I like this - he kicks off with quoting physics blogs on why lack of susy detection is heading physics into a crisis, then he reassures us…
catdynamics | May 24, 2010I am visiting the lovely Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, again.
Last thursday we had an unusual occurrence, the ocean farted.
I am staying at the new visitors' cottages at Coal Point
- by the way, if you're the type to visit KITP, and a lot of you are, you know who you are... then I highly recommend the West Cottages.
Anyway, Coal Point is so named, because it is the site of the largest natural oil seepage known - about 100 barrels per day! That is about 1% of the likely leak rate at Deepwater Horizons in the Gulf of Mexico - and it is open to the Pacific, pretty much.
The oil…
catdynamics | April 2, 2010Final day of the Exoplanet Rising workshop.
Start off with migration theory, then scattering and collisions.
Finish with tidal destruction and future observational prospects.
Lubow and Malhotra.
Then Thommes and Armitage.
Followed by Ogilvie and Traub.
Then we are done.
This is a public service announcement: Extreme Solar Systems II - Sep. 2011
Announcement went out a few days ago and pre-registration for the meeting is nearing capacity. If you are contemplating attending, then pre-register ASAP, please.
Lubow is up first.
Migration is still an issue, even if most planets maybe don't…
catdynamics | April 1, 2010Exoplanets Rising continues theoretical rumination, as we contemplate formation, migration, water delivery and evolution
Johansen and Lissauer on oligarchic models before lunch.
Then Mayer on collapse of Too Big Too Fail blobs before Chambers and Raymond return to rocks bashing into each other.
Finish with Mardling looking at the subtleties of tidal evolution.
Ok, Showman and Dobbs-Dixon did the whole giant circulation thing early this morning, but I wasn't here for that. It is all online if you like that sort of thing.
Good review by Anders on dust bunnies and the irritation dust causes.…
catdynamics | April 1, 2010Surprise discovery announcement at the Exoplanet UpRising workshop!
In a dramatic change in schedule, Fieffe Menteur, a junior researcher at the French Academy for Keplerian Exoplanets broke embargo and revealed the first discovery of a habitable exoplanet!
Dateline 2010-04-01:
The object, tentatively named Matsya seems to be a warm Super-Ganymede, orbiting a Warm Giant Planet, tentatively named Navistan in the habitable zone of a K3VIz star HD234789 - to be announced as CoRoT-26bc, aka KOI-13bc (according to NASA anyway) in a pair of joint papers to appear in a journal of Science today.…
catdynamics | March 31, 2010Finding and characterizing habitable exoplanets.
Enric Palle on Earth as an exoplanet.
Drake Deming on using JWST to find exoplanets
Then Lisa Kaltenegger on biosignatures
Jim Kasting on habitability and 3D GCMs.
Missed Palle's talk. It is online...
Talked about transmission spectra, reflectance, variability, polarization, red edge.
Caught the discussion, some interesting banter.
On the "red edge" - there will be something like it on any efficient biosphere because plants must absorb efficiently near the peak transmission spectrum of the star, and there must be some heat rejection at some…
catdynamics | March 31, 2010
Workshop turns more to theory: planetary structure, crusts and atmospheres; cooling and heating. Well, it is an Institute of Theoretical Physics...
Adamses Burrows and Burgasser start the morning.
We're promised things will be stirred up a bit more.
Diana Valencia on super-earth structure and composition,
then Chris Sotin on water worlds.
Burrows: interesting figure on estimated core mass of hot giant planets (detected through transits) vs host star metallicity.
Inferred core mass has apparent correlation with stellar metallicity. Higher the stellar metallicity the more massive the…
catdynamics | March 30, 2010Next we review microlensing surveys for planets and then direct imaging surveys.
Scott Gaudi up first on microlensing.
Interesting statistics on preponderance of solar like planetary systems.
Hints of free floating planets seen.
Paul Kalas on direct detections.
Also Graham and Kadsin.
Plus bonus "structure of giant planets" review at the end.
Microlensing:
Rapid fire overview and list of surveys.
If you want a summary of what it is and who is doing it, read the opening slides.
Get statistics of planets in otherwise inaccessible mass-orbit parameter space, but no or limited followup for most…
catdynamics | March 30, 2010Status of CoRoT and Kepler missions is reviewed at the "Exoplanets Rising" workshop at the Kavli Institute, we'll see if there are any news.
CoRoT is up first. Magali Deleuil presenting.
Kepler next with Bill Borucki.
CoRoT nominal mission ends tomorrow!
Extended missions to end of March 2013.
Some camera trouble on CoRoT - done 13 observing runs.
75,000 light curves from long (60 d) stares, 50,000 light curves from short (25 d) stares.
Lots of fun stars doing their funky stuff.
There will be a lot of CoRoT primary science, not just planet detections.
The astroseismologists are really having…