UChicago Astronomy Workshops

The Arts|Science Initiative will host a free lecture and discussion on why images of the universe - spacescapes - are so beautiful, at 7 pm Feb 5 in the performance hall of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.

The guest speaker will be the University of Chicago's Michael S. Turner, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist who coined the term "dark energy". The audience will travel through space and time with Turner to explore the age of the universe, black holes in galaxies, the birth of stars, and most significantly the mystery of dark energy, whose repulsive gravity is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate, through the extraordinarily artful visualizations with images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes..

Turner is the Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics and director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. He helped establish the interdisciplinary field that combines cosmology and elementary particle physics to understand the origin and evolution of the universe. His research focuses on the earliest moments of creation, and he has made contributions to inflationary cosmology, particle dark matter and structure formation, the theory of big bang nucleosynthesis, and the nature of dark energy.

9:00 - 10:30 am
Welcome and Presentation: Speakers Profs. Olinto (welcome), Hu, Bean, Gladders
LASR conference room
10:30 - 12:00 pm
Meetings
12:00 - 1:30 pm
KICP Lunch Seminar: speaker Ann Zabludoff – University of Arizon/Steward Observatory, LASR lounge (lunch will be provided)
1:30 - 2:00 pm
Outreach Presentation w/ Randy Landsberg, TAAC 67
2:00 - 4:00 pm
Meetings
4:00 - 5:00 pm
Graduate Student Panel Discussion, TAAC 67
5:00 - 6:00 pm
Wine and Cheese Reception, Kitchen/Library
8:00 pm
Maggiano's Little Italy

Please note that you are all invited to the Wine and Cheese Reception which begins
at 5:00 pm.

This quarter's Postdoc Symposium will be on March 15, 9:30AM-12PM.

The program:

• 09:30-9:55
  Stephen Hoover - Measuring the Polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background
• 09:55-10:20
  Reina Reyes - Is LambdaCDM consistent with the Tully-Fisher relation
• 10:20-10:45
  Suman Bhattacharya
• 10:45-11:10
  Ali Vanderveld - Weak lensing with the Euclid mission
• 11:10-11:35
  Peter Adshead

On Friday March 29, 12:00-12:30pm PDT, science writer Bruce Lieberman will ask your questions about the starbursts and the early universe with members of the research team: John E. Carlstrom, Dan P. Marrone and Joaquin D. Vieira.

You are cordially invited to attend The Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture on Wednesday, April 17, 2013, given by Professor Michael S. Turner.

Lecture: "Quarks and the Cosmos"

A lecture to be given by Michael S. Turner, the Bruce V. & Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor, and Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 East 59th Street

* Lecture: Max Palevsky Cinema at 5:00 p.m.
* Reception: Library/Lounge at 6:00 p.m.
Lecture and Reception are free and open to the public.

The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago will host a two-day workshop focusing on solid-state technologies to build cameras for both space and ground-based astroparticle physics experiments. In particular, alternatives to MAPMTs for the JEM-EUSO focal plane and CTA cameras will be discussed including SiPM and G-APD. The workshop will be structured as a series of presentations with ample time for discussions and working sessions.

The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago and GMTO are planning a joint workshop to be held in Chicago on June 10-12, 2013. The goal of the conference is to examine the role of galaxies as probes of cosmology, both today and in the future as large galaxy surveys and the next generation of large telescopes, in space and on the ground, come into being. We will bring together theorists and observers to discuss contemporary problems in cosmology and galaxy evolution as well as the opportunities offered by a new generation of facilities and surveys.

The conference will be organized into five half-day sessions. Keynote speakers will provide an overview of the state of theory and observation in each subfield. Contributed lectures will delve into the details of front-line research issues. The first session will review relevant surveys and facilities, including the GMT, large imaging surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey, LSST, and Euclid among others, and upcoming missions, such as the James Webb Space Telescope. This will be followed by sessions on First-Light and Reionization of the Universe, Galaxy Formation and Assembly, Intergalactic and Circumgalactic Gas, and Galaxies & the Intergalactic medium as probes of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. The conference will be held in downtown Chicago at the University of Chicago's Gleacher Center. A gala conference banquet will be held at the Adler Planetarium looking out on to Lake Michigan.

The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago will host "Galaxies within the Cosmic Web" workshop on June 17-21, 2013. The workshop will be held in the lecture hall 120 in the Kersten Physics Teaching Center (KPTC) on the University of Chicago campus.

During the last thirty years, studies of structure formation have played a key role in establishing the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm of structure formation in an expanding universe. In the CDM model the initial Gaussian density perturbations are shaped by gravity into a cosmic web of voids and filaments, at the intersection of which galaxies and galaxy clusters are mainly thought to form. Although the model has been a tremendous success in explaining the observed large-scale structure of the universe, many key aspects of how galaxies form and evolve within this cosmic web of dark matter and diffuse gas are still not understood. The gaps in our understanding not only hamper interpretation of the wealth of observational data on galaxy evolution, but also represent a major systematic uncertainty for cosmological probes of the accelerated expansion of the universe, the nature of gravity, and forecasts and interpretation of direct and indirect dark matter searches.

This workshop will assemble both observers and theorists (target size ~60-80 people) who work on all key aspects of galaxy formation to assess recent progress and, most importantly, to germinate new ideas for how to improve our understanding of galaxy formation, the relation between the baryonic mass of galaxies and their parent halos, the effects of galaxy assembly and associated feedback on the spatial distribution of dark matter, and the interpretation of galaxy clustering and bias from large surveys to constrain the evolution of dark energy. The focus of the meeting will be on the most rapidly developing and interesting topics of research, and the format will include ample time for discussion and unstructured interaction.

The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago will host a Summer School on Computational Cosmology from August 5 to August 16, 2013.

The aim of the School is to expose a select group of 15 to 20 graduate students to the challenges of modern high-performance computing in cosmological research. During the school the emphasis will be on specific hands-on projects designed to teach modern cosmological simulation techniques. The course will also inform students regarding current challenges in the era of petascale supercomputing, and near future challenges, as computation transitions from the petascale to the exascale within the next decade.

Orientation discussion sessions on ongoing projects and/or a brief lecture in the morning of each day will be followed by work on individual research projects under the guidance and supervision of school instructors and assistants. The projects will be designed to teach students to set up and run modern N-body and associated analyses (halo finding, visualization, MCMC calculations). Computational work will be carried out on the University of Chicago midway cluster and on development racks of the Blue Gene Q Mira supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL).

The School will be held in the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research (LASR) at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. Students will spend the last 2-3 days of the school at Argonne National Laboratory, where they will be introduced to the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and the Exascale Technology and Computing Institute and will have a chance to implement visualizations of the data based on their school project at the ALCF visualization lab.