Recently, several massive structures at redshifts as high as z=8 have been discovered, many of which are thought to be the progenitors of todays most massive clusters of galaxies. The star formation rates observed in these "protoclusters" is much higher than expected, and the origin of these extreme star bursts is currently a matter of heavy debate. Using the power of the state-of-the-art...
The present tensions between theory predictions and measurements in
semileptonic decays of bottom hadrons have sparked widespread interest
as possible indicators of Physics beyond the Standard Model. At the same
time, these tensions motivate thorough checks of the Standard Model
predictions, in terms of both methods and inputs. In this presentation I will
discuss recent and ongoing...
Two phenomena contribute to correlating galaxy shapes across the Universe: the deviation of photons from a straight path due to the spacetime curvature ("gravitational lensing”), and tidal interactions (“intrinsic alignments”). Modelling both accurately is crucial to obtaining unbiased constraints on the cosmological model from forthcoming surveys, particularly in the context of elucidating...
The cosmic large-scale distribution of matter encodes a wealth of information about our Universe. In this talk, I will show results on the observational signatures expected from galaxy formation processes, such as black hole feedback, as well as from primordial Universe physics during Inflation. These results were obtained with the aid of "Response Functions", which describe rigorously the...
It is widely accepted that nucleic acids were crucial for the emergence of primitive life on Earth 3.5 – 4 billion years ago. However, geochemical conditions on early Earth must have differed greatly from the constant internal milieus of today's cells where modern biocatalysis takes place. Our research focuses on the activity of catalytic RNA polymers (ribozymes) under extreme and/or unusual...
Subsequent to the Moon’s formation, late accretion to the terrestrial planets strongly modified the physical and chemical nature of their silicate crusts and mantles. Here, dynamical N-body and Monte Carlo simulations are combined to determine impact probabilities, impact velocities, and expected mass augmentation onto the terrestrial planets from three sources: planetesimals left over from...
In this talk, I will briefly discuss the variety of research topics related to dark matter within ORIGINS, and what we can learn from combining them.
Recently, a sub-arcsecond resolution survey of the dust continuum emission from nearby protoplanetary disks, conducted with the Submillimeter Array showed a strong correlation between the sizes and luminosities of the disks. Performing models of gas and dust disk evolution, we recreate this relation using a large grid of models that varies the initial conditions. We calculate the disk...
Protoplanetary disks are made out of gas and dust. In the beginning, the dust is only a small fraction of the total gas mass and is well mixed through the disk, however, regions such as snowlines, dead zones, and pressure maxima, can trap the solid particles and enhance the local dust-to-gas ratio. We show that when the concentration of solids is high enough, the dust back-reaction can modify...
We propose to perform a feasibility study to produce observational images of simulated galaxies, evaluating the possibility to connect different publicly available radiative transfer (RT) packages to different simulations based on GADGET (Dolag, Remus), RAMSES (Emsellem) and GASOLINE (Obreja).
As part of our ongoing project to determine $\alpha_{s}$ in a $2+1+1$-flavor lattice QCD calculation, we perform a 1-loop lattice perturbation theory computation to diminish the effects of finite lattice spacing.
I will report on the goal and the status of this project.
Heavy ion collision experiments at the LHC and RHIC seek to create and observe a new state of matter, the long-theorized quark gluon plasma (QGP). The behavior of heavy quarks and their in medium bound states are predicted to serve as a probe of the QGP; specifically, this in medium behavior is governed by transport coefficients which are currently the focus of experimental and theoretical...
