Agenda:
7:00 - 7:15 General Meeting & Announcements
7:15 - 7:30 Short topic presentation by a club member
7:30 - 7:45 Refreshment break
7:45 - Public Presentation
Speaker: Dr. Zachary Slepian - UF
Title: How Does the Universe Look in the Mirror?
Abstract:
Nature has a few fundamental symmetries, one of which is mirror symmetry (except for neutrinos). But is that really so? I will outline how we can use sets of four galaxies at a time, which form tetrahedrons, to probe whether the Universe looks the same in the mirror. I will show how this can be done with million to ten-million galaxy datasets such as that from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), and present recent results by my group that argue the Universe may not be so symmetric in the mirror, at high significance! I will discuss the implications of this—-new physics during the very earliest moments of the Universe (inflation), and maybe an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing (baryogenesis).
About the Speaker:
Originally from Fairfield, Connecticut, an early interest in philosophy led to his current interest in cosmology. He attended public high school, received a BA summa cum laude from Princeton (2011), working with J. Richard Gott, III on his senior thesis, an MSt in philosophy of physics at Oxford (2012), and a PhD in Astrophysics (2016) from Harvard, advised by Daniel J. Eisenstein. During his PhD, he focused on Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) in the 2-point and 3-point correlation function (3PCF) of galaxies, constraining a possible systematic sourced by high-redshift baryon-dark matter relative velocities using the 3PCF. This entailed developing a transformatively fast 3PCF algorithm, enabling the first high-significance detection of BAO in the 3PCF and a measurement of the cosmic distance scale six billion years ago to percent precision. Post-PhD, he spent one year as a Chamberlain Fellow and one year as an Einstein Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where highlights included an implementation of the 3PCF algorithm capable of computing the 3PCF for the entire observable Universe in 20-hours on NERSC’s Cori supercomputer, application of the 3PCF to MHD turbulence, and novel analytic solutions for the Friedmann equation in the presence of neutrinos or warm dark matter.
Research Interests:
Dark energy, dark matter, structure formation, large surveys, analytic methods, star formation. His current research follows three broad paths: creating theoretical models for large-scale structure, designing fast algorithms to measure it, and applying them to datasets such as BOSS, eBOSS, and DESI. Cutting across these areas are a strong attraction to analytic methods and excitement about effective use of high-performance computing.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Member's Corner Speaker: Dean Covey
Topic: Observing the Universe with a 20-Meter Telescope
