Events

Baryonic processes that alter the large-scale distribution of gas, and thus the matter power spectrum, such as AGN feedback, are one of the the main systematics in current and future weak lensing surveys. Left uncorrected, these effects will bias the inferred properties of dark matter and dark energy that these surveys are designed to measure. Characterising the distribution of gas is thus of vital importance if these surveys are to be exploited to their full potential.

Trinity was the codename for the test explosion of the atomic bomb in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. Frank Close tells the story of: the bomb's metaphorical father, Rudolf Peierls (Prof. Close's one time mentor in Oxford); his intellectual son, the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs; and the ghosts of the security services in Britain, the USA and USSR. Frank will reveal new insights from MI5 files in the British National Archives, and documents of the FBI and KGB.

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Abstract : Magnets are unarguably the "killer app" of superconductivity, with medical imaging magnets comprising an annual $2 billion market that consumes about 1000 tons of superconductor per year, and magnets for large science projects contributing a similar share.

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From gas-poor Earths to gas-rich Jupiters, planets come in a variety of sizes. I will describe the physics behind the diversity of exoplanets - how the core and gas assembly processes give rise to the observed distribution of radii and orbital periods. Basic astrophysical considerations of gas dynamical friction, gravitational scattering, collisional mergers, and gas accretion by cooling inform us that planets smaller than Neptune likely emerged in situ, in the late stages of disk evolution.

David Zimmerman is Professor of History at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of "Britain's Shield: Radar and the Defeat of the Luftwaffe"; "Top Secret Exchange: The Tizard Mission and the Scientific War"; "The Great Naval Battle of Ottawa"; "Coastal Fort: A History of Fort Sullivan, Maine"; and "Maritime Command Pacific: The Royal Canadian Navy in the Pacific during the Early Cold War".

Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo are currently in the middle of their third observing run, and releasing open public event alerts for the first time. The LIGO-Virgo collaboration has issued 28 un-retracted candidate event alerts as of September 11th, 2019, potentially adding dozens more known compact binary object mergers to the eleven confident detections from the first two Advanced-era observing runs. I'll give an overview of the process of detecting, characterizing, and assessing the significance of gravitational wave signals registered in Advanced LIGO data.

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The nearest stars and their companions provide the fundamental framework upon which all of stellar astronomy is based, for individual stars, stellar multiples, and entire stellar populations. We live in exciting times, as our map of the Sun's neighbors becomes enriched with details of other solar systems that will ultimately play key roles in our search for life elsewhere.

We provide the first method for fully quantum generative training of quantum Boltzmann machines with both visible and hidden units while using quantum relative entropy as an objective. This is significant because prior methods were not able to do so due to mathematical challenges posed by the gradient evaluation. We present two novel methods for solving this problem.

In recent years, quantum experiments have become increasingly complicated, with modern experiments pushing the limits of even our best supercomputers to simulate.  This increased complexity has made quantum devices challenging to model, which in turn makes them both difficult to control in quantum technologies and also exceedingly difficult to understand.  In this talk, I will show how ideas from machine learning and statistical inference can be used to probe complex quantum systems.  In particular, we will show how these methods can allow us to identify common pathologies in

Abstract: In the hydrodynamic regime it is possible to investigate the universal collision-dominated dynamics of the isolated electron fluid, while the couplings to the lattice and to impurities becomes secondary. An important transport property is the shear viscosity which describes whether the electron fluid behaves laminar or turbulent. The ratio shear viscosity over entropy is bounded from below and is an indicator for how strongly the system is interacting [Kovtun].

Muon to electron conversion is a process which violates the conservation of charged lepton flavor. It is forbidden in the Standard Model, but new physics beyond the SM predict its sizable rate. New experiments under preparation in Japan and the US will start soon in a few years, aiming at improvement of four orders of magnitude, with new innovative muon sources. This talk will discuss Its physics motivation, and an outlook on the experiments.

Special seminar in honour of Toshio Numao.

We found a Higgs boson and are learning more its properties with collision data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its future upgrade HL-LHC. But to unveil the fundamental nature of this particle and to explore potential new physics, we would need high energy electron-positron colliders with high luminosity. In this talk, I will introduce such an initiative from China, the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC). I will discuss its science case, the conceptual design, and the status and prospects of the project.

Most galaxies comparable to or larger than the mass of the Milky Way host hot, X-ray emitting atmospheres, and many such galaxies are radio sources. Hot atmospheres and radio jets and lobes are the ingredients of radio-mechanical active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback. While a consensus has emerged that such feedback suppresses cooling of hot cluster atmospheres, less attention has been paid to massive galaxies where similar mechanisms are at play.

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NASA recently selected the Dragonfly quadcopter, on which I serve as Deputy Principal Investigator, as the fourth mission in its New Frontiers program of planetary missions.  Dragonfly will land on the surface of Saturn's hazy moon Titan to explore prebiotic chemistry, to evaluate its habitability, and look for chemical biosignatures.  Titan is one of just 4 planetary bodies that has both a thick atmosphere and a solid surface - Venus, Earth, and Mars are the others.