Events

Astronomy Seminar Series

Doug Johnstone

We have undertaken a 4-year dedicated JCMT/SCUBA-2 monitoring program of eight nearby star-forming regions (Herczeg et al. 2017) to search for sub-mm brightness variations as a proxy of episodic accretion. In this talk I will discuss the novel methods used to reach a relative calibration of 2% (Mairs et al. 2017a) and present the first variable source found in the sub-mm with a quasi-periodic light curve, the Class I protostar EC 53 in Serpens Main (Yoo et al. 2017).

Astronomy Seminar Series

Adrienne Erickcek

As remnants of the earliest stages of structure formation, the smallest dark matter halos provide a unique probe of the density fluctuations generated during inflation and the evolution of the Universe shortly after inflation.  The absence of early-forming ultra-compact minihalos (UCMHs) establishes an upper bound on the amplitude of the primordial power spectrum on small scales and has been used to constrain inflationary models.  I will show how numerical simulations of UCMH formation reveal that these constraints need to be re

Quantum Information Seminar

Arash Ahmadi, Ph.D. Graduate Student

In this talk I will present our work on nanowire quantum dots (QDs), and discuss how proper excitation of the source can lead to an enhancement of the performance of our source. My talk will focus on generation of entangled photon-pairs in a QD embeded in a photonic nanowire. Our results indicate that, in spite of a large nuclear spin and fine-structure splitting, nanowire QDs are capable of generating dephasing-free entangled photons.

Event postponed due to poor weather conditions; updates (if applicable) will be posted

Astronomy Seminar Series

Go Ogiya

The coalescence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) should generate the strongest sources of gravitational waves (GWs) in the Universe. However, the dynamics of their coalescence is the subject of much debate. In this study, we use a suite of N-body simulations to follow the merger of two nuclear star clusters (NSCs), each hosting a SMBH in their centre.

Astronomy Seminar Series

Matt Dobbs

Technology advances has opened a new era of radio observations. We are now monitoring the sky at millisecond cadence and discovering a vast catalog of new fast radio transients while simultaneously making deep maps of structure in the universe using hydrogen intensity mapping as a tracer.

Astronomy Seminar Series

Ludovic Van Waerbeke, University of British Columbia

Let's assume dark matter is a particle. The DM theories currently tested, WIMPs-like, either via direct or indirect detection, cover only a tiny range of the allowed DM parameters space, and have not been particularly successful so far. A new DM candidate, the Axion Quark Nugget (AQN), has been proposed by Zhitnitsky in 2003, partly inspired by the quark nuggets (Witten 1984).

Astronomy Seminar Series

Alice Pisani, Princeton University

Modern surveys allow us to access to high quality measurements on large areas in the sky and span large redshift ranges—thus sampling the galaxy distribution in detail also in the emptier regions, voids. Void cosmology is hence becoming an increasingly active sector of galaxy clustering analysis: by measuring void properties, such as the abundance or the density profiles, it is possible to constrain cosmological parameters.

Set the books aside for a couple of hours and join us for a study break!

We see you working hard all term – let’s take a minute to relax and celebrate your accomplishments.

Astronomy Seminar Series

Nienke van der Marel, University of British Columbia

Successful exoplanet surveys in the last decade have revealed that planets are ubiquitous throughout the Milky Way, and show a large diversity in mass, location and composition. At the same time, new facilities such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and optical/infrared facilities including Gemini/GPI and VLT/SPHERE have provided us with sharper images than ever before of protoplanetary disks around young stars, the birth cradles of planets.