| Date | Speaker | Title | Local Host |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sept. 9 | Peter Koch Stony Brook University |
Chair's Colloquium | |
| Sept. 16 | Seamus Davis Cornell |
TBD | Meigan Aronson |
| Sept. 23 | Anand Sivaramakrishnan AMNH |
Planet-hunting with adaptive optics and interferometry Extending particular frontiers of instrumentation can result in major advances in astronomical understanding. The study of planet and star formation is in the midst of such an expansion now. Bright speckles around a stellar image swamp any faint planetary companion's signal. This speckle noise results from tiny residual errors in the almost perfect optics of today's telescopes. Instruments dedicated to direct detection and characterization of extrasolar planets must combat this speckle noise to deliver science. I will explain the imaging problem, show how adaptive optics coronagraphy reduces speckle noise, and present some of our ground-breaking coronagraphic results. We recently captured the first image of a solar-system scale planet-forming disk around a young star, opening up search spaces inaccessible to even the Hubble Space Telescope. I will also describe a new approach, the non-redundant masking of a telescope aperture, which eliminates speckle noise. With such aperture masking we can peer closer to a star than has hitherto been possible. We hope to implement this technique on NASA's flagship mission, the 6.5-m IR James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013. |
Michael Zingale |
| Sept. 30 | no colloquium -- Rosh Hashanah | ||
| Oct. 7 | Piers Coleman Rutgers |
TBD | Meigan Aronson |
| Oct. 14 | |||
| Oct. 21 | Wesley Smith University of Wisconsin at Madison |
Startup of the Large Hadron Collider The LHC at CERN will collide proton beams at 14 TeV center of mass energy and 100 times the luminosity of previous colliders. It will search for the mechanism of particle mass generation, supersymmetry that links mass particles with force particles, the dark matter making up most of the universe and extra dimensions. This facility is just starting operation and the latest information about first collisions at 10 TeV, the experiments and the machine will be presented. |
Abhay Deshpande |
| Oct. 28 | Wendy Zhang University of Chicago |
Dynamics of Fluid Shape Transitions | Phil Allen / Michael Zingale |
| Nov. 4 | Peter Nugent Lawrence Berkeley Lab |
TBD | Michael Zingale |
| Nov. 11 | John Thomas Duke University |
Perfect Fluidity in a Strongly Interacting Atomic Fermi Gas | Hal Metcalf |
| Nov. 18 | Xiangdong Ji University of Maryland |
TBD | Abhay Deshpande |
| Nov. 25 | David DeMille Yale |
TBD | Hal Metcalf |
| Dec. 2 | Gordon Kane Michigan |
TBD | Michael Zingale |
| Dec. 9 | Jamie Nagle University of Colorado at Boulder |
TBD | Abhay Deshpande |
| Date | Speaker | Title | Local Host |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan. 27 | |||
| Feb. 3 | |||
| Feb. 10 | |||
| Feb. 17 | |||
| Feb. 24 | |||
| March 3 | |||
| March 10 | |||
| March 17 | Adam Burrows Princeton |
TBD | Michael Zingale |
| March 24 | |||
| March 31 | |||
| April 7 | no colloquium -- spring break | ||
| April 14 | |||
| April 21 | |||
| April 28 | |||
| May 5 | Award Colloquium | ||