Blogs / Cosmic Variance

I’m in the middle of a particularly hectic week that, nevertheless, is wonderful physics fun.

It started on Sunday evening, when my long-time collaborator, Tanmay Vachaspati, and four other members of the Case Western Reserve Particle Astrophysics group arrived at my house. The cosmology group from Syracuse joined us, making eleven people in total, including faculty, postdocs and students. We all ordered in Chinese food, had a few drinks, and talked about physics and life until, at a fairly late hour, we broke up and distributed our guests among our houses to spend the night. It’s always great to hang out with our group, but this was even more enjoyable. Since I used to be a postdoc at Case Western, two of our guests were people I’ve known for a long time and the rest were people I already knew from other physics meetings.

These people drove for six hours to attend the 4th Syracuse-Cornell Joint Theory Meeting, which was held at Syracuse on Monday. Our visitors from Case and also a couple of students who drove from Buffalo, made this meeting the largest one we’ve held so far. The master organizer was our cosmology postdoc, Levon Pogosian, whose attention to detail minimized both the organizational demands on me and the need for any last minute work. Nevertheless, Monday was a very hectic day.

By 10:15am, all our visitors had arrived – about 50 of us in total – people had had a little breakfast, refilled their coffees and we were ready to begin. The structure of these meetings is that graduate students and postdocs give almost all the talks, sometimes with a few faculty talks, and that we allow plenty of time for the discussion of ideas that are presented. Most people talk about work in progress, which makes these meetings a particularly efficient way to get feedback about new ideas, as well as a great chance for students to get experience giving talks.

In the foreground are Csaba Csaki, Levon Pogosian and Eanna Flanagan discussing during one of the coffee breaks.

Our talks were fantastic! The students had worked extremely hard and, whether they used whiteboard, slides or a computer as their medium of choice, they managed their time wonderfully (15 minute talks, strictly enforced) and got a lot of information across. Levon had put together an interesting program – here’s the list of talks

• Simon Catterall (Syracuse) “Twisted lattice supersymmetry”
• Babar Qureshi (Syracuse) “Twist deformed supersymmetry”
• Andrew Noble (Cornell) “Electroweak Precision Constraints on the Littlest Higgs Model with T Parity”
• Seong Lee (Cornell) “The flavor of a little Higgs with T-parity”
• Renata Jora (Syracuse) “Linear sigma model with two chiral nonets”
• Matthew Reece (Cornell) “Top partners at the LHC: mass and spin measurement”
• Seong Chan Park (Cornell) “Fully radiative electroweak symmetry breaking”
• Ali Vanderveld (Cornell) “Observational constraints on the matter couplings of K-essence theories”
• Alessandra Silvestri (Syracuse) “Large Scale Structure formation in Modified-Source Gravity”
• Dejan Stojkovic (Case) “Can black hole events from cosmic rays be observed at the Auger Observatory?”
• Tanja Hinderer (Cornell) “Gravitational waves”
• Brian Powell (Buffalo) “The Lyth Bound and Inflation as an Effective Field Theory”
• Sourish Dutta (Case) “A Classical Treatment of Island Cosmology”
• Sarah Shandera (Cornell) “Brane inflation update”
• Mark Wyman (Cornell) “Modeling (p,q) strings with a gauge theory”
• Francesc Ferrer (Case) “511 KeV photons from superconducting cosmic strings”

Great stuff! Afterwards, a remarkable 28 of us went out for, as Levon put it at the end of the program

• 5:45 – to the pub and out to dinner

It was a relaxing and fun way to end a busy and productive day, as you can see. In the picture on the right is Sarah Shandera, a Cornell graduate student, wondering how she will ever eat this huge fish sandwich, while Henry Tye looks on.

The Syracuse crowd was having a blast also; in the left picture is my student Alessandra Silvestri with Syracuse graduate student Anosh Joseph (left) and Levon Pogosian again.

So this was my Monday. Yesterday I taught my last class of the semester and then, in the evening, we had the 5th installment of Café Scientifique Syracuse. I’ll post about that separately, but may not find time for the rest of the week because there’s so much going on.

I finished writing my final exam today and sent it to my students. I wanted to get this finished because late tonight my co-blogger JoAnne Hewett is arriving. JoAnne is giving our departmental colloquium tomorrow, and then a theory seminar on Friday. We’ll be working pretty hard, as well as finding time to relax and perhaps even to discuss things bloggy. I want to make sure I leave enough free time to squeeze all the physics I can out of JoAnne, including some help I need with an extra dimensions project I’m working on with three postdocs here.

JoAnne leaves on Friday evening, and on Saturday morning I fly to Chicago to take part in New Views of the Universe, The Inaugural Symposium of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, held in honor of David Schramm by the University of Chicago, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.

This will be an opportunity to see some excellent talks and to discuss cosmology with a large group of my fellow cosmologists. Sean and I will be trying to steal some time to work on a couple of projects that are nearing completion, and I hope to meet Risa at long last. If I could only find a way to see Clifford in the same time frame, that would be something.

As you can see, this is a pretty crazy week. But it is also very exciting to have so many things going on centered around cosmology and particle physics, and science in general, here at Syracuse. There’ll be a little time to relax now that the break is almost here (this is the last week of classes for us), but until then I’m going full tilt.