Event Calendar

Title: Black Hole Cinema

Abstract: With luck, the Event Horizon Telescope is now embarking on its second set of observations with an array capable of generating images of known supermassive black hole candidates that resolve their horizon. The primary targets of the EHT are highly variable, known to generate flares and ejections on timescales as short as 30 minutes and extending to weeks. Therefore, we are about to enter an era of dynamical, horizon-scale studies of black hole physics. I will describe some of the origins of this variability, and how it can be exploited to learn about the growth of black holes, how they launch the relativistic flows responsible for their inordinate impact on the universe, and the nature of gravity in their vicinity.

Host: Rachael Alexandroff

Title: Prospects for CMB lensing-galaxy clustering cross-correlations and initial condition reconstruction

Abstract: The lensing convergence measurable with future CMB experiments will be highly correlated with the clustering of galaxies that will be observed by imaging surveys such as LSST. I will discuss prospects for using that cross-correlation signal to constrain local primordial non-Gaussianity, the amplitude of matter fluctuations as a function of redshift, halo bias, and possibly the sum of neutrino masses. A key limitation for such analyses and large-scale structure analyses in general is that the mapping from initial conditions to observables is nonlinear for wavenumbers k>0.1h/Mpc. This can destroy cosmological information or move it to non-Gaussian tails of the probability distribution that are difficult to measure. I will describe how we can use recently developed initial condition reconstruction methods to help us recover some of that information in the nonlinear regime.

Host: Viswesh Marthi

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA

Host: Almog Yalinewich

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA