Symposium - Symmetries and Phases in the Universe

23 Jun 2008, 10:00 → 25 Jun 2008, 18:30 Europe/Berlin

Kloster Irsee

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Cosmology is a broad interdisciplinary research discipline involving different fields of physics. The main goal of the Excellence Cluster Universe is to face the fundamental challenges of modern cosmology by bridging the gap between the astrophysics and the particle/nuclear physics communities. Therefore, the Excellence Cluster Universe organizes the symposium ‘Symmetries and Phases in the Universe’ which is held in the beautiful scenery at Kloster Irsee. The Symposium will present international top-level experts providing insights into the current status in their respective fields. Selected researchers will join the meeting for interdisciplinary discussions.

This is the list of speakers and title of their talk:

Lars Bergström (Stockholm, Sweden): Dark matter: candidates and detection methods
Pierre Binétruy (Paris, France): Brane inflation
Peter Braun-Munzinger (GSI, Germany): Ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions and the QCD phase diagram
Wilfried Buchmüller (DESY, Germany): Baryogenesis and dark matter
Daniel Denegri (CERN Switzerland): Getting ready for the LHC
Alvaro de Rujula (CERN Switzerland): The threat of dark science
Gino Isidori (LNF Frascati, Italy): The breaking of CP and flavor symmetries
Manfred Lindner (MPIK Heidelberg, Germany): Neutrinos as probe of new physics
Thanu Padmanabhan (IUCAA Pune, India): Gravity: The inside story
Angela Olinto (Chicago, USA): The origin of the highest energy particles
Keith Olive (Minnesota, USA): Big Bang Nucleosynthesis: status of concordance
Bernard Schutz (AEI Potsdam, Germany): Gravitational wave cosmology
Joe Silk (Oxford, UK): The evolution of structure in the universe
George Smoot (LBL Berkeley, USA): The Cosmic Microwave Background
Wolfram Weise (TU Munich, Germany): Phases of QCD

Everybody is invited to apply for participation by filling in the form (register button). As we can only provide limited attendance, a committee will select the participants.

Conference photo IMG_7124.JPG

Poster SymposiumA4.pdf

Monday 23 June

10:00 → 12:00 Registration

12:00 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 14:45 Session 1

13:30 → 14:15 Talk 1: The evolution of structure in the universe

The origin of the galaxies represents an important focus of current cosmological research, both observational and theoretical. Its resolution involves a comprehensive understanding of star formation, galaxy dynamics, dark matter and the cosmology of the very early universe. It is a field that is largely driven by a phenomenology that depends on our accumulating data taken with the largest available telescopes. I will review our current understanding of galaxy formation and assess the challenges that lie ahead.

Speaker: Joseph Silk

Slides TALK01_Silk.pDF

14:15 → 14:45 Discussion 1

Speaker: Ralf Bender

14:45 → 16:00 Session 2

14:45 Talk 11: Brane inflation

Speaker: Pierre Binétruy

14:45 → 15:30 Talk 2: Brane inflation

I discuss how inflation scenarios are constructed in the context of string and brane models. The most relevant difficulties encountered along the road as well as the solutions envisaged to solve them will be reviewed. Open questions as well as predictions for observables will be discussed.

Speaker: Pierre Binetruy

Slides TALK02_Binetruy.pdf

15:30 → 16:00 Discussion 2

Speaker: Dieter Lüst

16:00 → 16:30 Coffee break

16:30 → 17:45 Session 3

16:30 → 17:15 Talk 3: The threat of dark science

Much of this symposium will be devoted to the "science of the dark": dark mass and energy, black holes, the universe when it was not transparent to visible light, etc. My talk, contrariwise, will be dedicated to the brightest objects sometimes visible by eye from cosmological distances: gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). There has been considerable progress in the understanding of GRBs during the recent "Swift era". This satellite has filled a gap in the observations of GRBs and their afterglows, mainly in the X-ray domain, wherein previous information was scarce. I contend that GRBs are very well understood, since the predictions for them are fulfilled in detail, in spite of the elementary simplicity of the underlying physics. I shall concentrate on the science of the subject, but my title refers to its dark sociological aspects, which may be threatening in other domains as well.

Speaker: Alvaro De Rujula

Video of a similar talk held at the CERN Colloquium http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1103599

17:15 → 17:45 Discussion 3

Speaker: Roland Diehl

Slides TALK03_Diehl.pdf

17:45 → 19:00 Session 4

17:45 → 18:30 Talk 4: Getting ready for the LHC

The present status of the LHC project will be described, i.e. the progress on the commissioning of the LHC and the expected start-up scenario for mid- 2008. In particular, the status and commissioning of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector will be discussed. In the science part of the talk, some physics expectations concerning top studies, Higgs searches, supersymmetry and extra dimensions studies will be presented.

Speaker: Daniel Denegri

Slides TALK04_Denegri.pdf

18:30 → 19:00 Discussion 4

Speaker: Siegfried Bethke

19:00 → 20:00 Welcome drink

20:00 → 21:30 Dinner

Tuesday 24 June

08:00 → 09:00 Breakfast

09:00 → 10:15 Session 5

09:00 → 09:45 Talk 5: Gravitational wave cosmology

The gravitational wave detectors LIGO and VIRGO will begin regular observations of merging binary neutron stars and black holes at modest redshifts by 2014 and perhaps even sooner. LISA, whose launch is presently scheduled for 2018, will observe the inspiral and merger of massive black holes out to any redshift at which they occur in LISA’s frequency band. These systems are ‘standard sirens’ whose signal contains enough information to determine their luminosity distances. This is a calibration-free distance measure, independent of the usual cosmic distance ladder. Neutron-star coalescences may be associated with short gamma-ray bursts, whose redshifts can be obtained from their afterglows. The resulting measurement of the Hubble constant by LIGO and VIRGO could reach the 1% accuracy level. In the case of LISA, recent work on its ability to locate binary signals suggests that, at redshifts of order 1, positions should be accurate to tens of arcminutes. If black-hole coalescences mark their host galaxies in an observable way, then LISA could measure dark energy and its evolution with an accuracy competitive with that expected from many survey techniques, and it would have the chance of directly measuring the luminosity-distance relation out to redshifts of 5 or greater.

Speaker: Bernard Schutz

Slides TALK05_Schutz.pdf

09:45 → 10:15 Discussion 5

Speaker: Gerhard Boerner

10:15 → 10:45 Coffee break

10:45 → 12:00 Session 6

10:45 → 11:30 Talk 6: Gravity: The inside story

I will describe an alternative perspective on gravity which describes it as an emergent phenomenon (like e.g., elasticity). This approach provides a deeper understanding of several inexplicable features of conventional gravity related to the thermodynamic properties of horizons. The field equations arise from an entropy maximization principle and reduce to standard Einstein's equations at the lowest order. The new perspective also has important implications for the cosmological constant problem which I will discuss.

Speaker: Thanu Padmanabhan

Slides TALK06_Padmanabhan.pdf

11:30 → 12:00 Discussion 6

Speaker: Andreas Müller

12:00 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 15:00 Session 7+8

13:30 → 14:00 Talk 7: Ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions and the QCD phase diagram

We discuss recent experimental results on the collisions of atomic nuclei at ultra-relativistic energies. In such collisions a very hot and dense fireball is formed which equilibrizes rapidly and expands collectively much like an ideal fluid. At least initially the fireball is dense enough to strongly degrade the energy of high momentum partons. We will demonstrate that hadron production takes place at the phase boundary between QGP and the hadronic phase and discuss the implications of this finding. Finally, we will discuss how various probes such as heavy quarks and quarkonia can be used to diagnose the QGP and discuss the prospects of QGP research at the LHC accelerator which will start operations in summer 2008.

Speaker: Peter Braun-Munzinger

Slides TALK07_Braun-Munzinger.pdf

14:00 → 14:30 Talk 8: Phases of QCD

A survey is given of present views concerning the phase diagram of Quantum Chromodynamics, with emphasis on quark-gluon matter under extreme conditions of temperature and density. Recent results from lattics QCD are reviewed. Approaches for modeling QCD thermodynamics, its symmetry breaking patterns and phases are outlined. Current physics issues related to the phases of QCD, from the early universe to high-energy nuclear collisions and properties of neutron stars, are discussed.

Speaker: Wolfram Weise

Slides TALK08_Weise.pdf

14:30 → 15:00 Discussion 7+8

Speaker: Stephan Paul

15:00 → 15:30 Coffee break

15:30 → 16:45 Session 9

15:30 → 16:15 Talk 9: Neutrinos as probe of new physics

Neutrinos are very special particles which give unique insights into various fundamental issues in particle and astroparticle physics. On the other side, neutrinos are also very special probes into the different sources. This leads to interesting connections to astrophysics, cosmology, nuclear physics and geophysics. A selection of recent results and an outlook on future developments will be given.

Speaker: Manfred Lindner

Slides TALK09_Lindner.pdf

16:15 → 16:45 Discussion 9

Speaker: Franz von Feilitzsch

16:45 → 18:00 Session 10

16:45 → 17:30 Talk 10: Baryogenesis and dark matter

The classical picture of GUT baryogenesis has been strongly modified by theoretical progress concerning two nonperturbative features of the standard model: the phase diagram of the electroweak theory, and baryon and lepton number changing sphaleron processes in the high-temperature symmetric phase. We review three viable models, electroweak baryogenesis, the Affleck-Dine mechanism and leptogenesis and discuss the prospects to falsify them. All models are closely tied to the nature of dark matter, especially in supersymmetric theories. In the near future results from LHC and gamma-ray astronomy will shed new light on the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe.

Speaker: Wilfried Buchmüller

Slides TALK10_Buchmuller.pdf

17:30 → 18:00 Discussion 10

Speaker: Georg Raffelt

18:00 → 19:00 Poster session & Social gathering

20:00 → 21:30 Dinner

Wednesday 25 June

08:00 → 09:00 Breakfast

09:00 → 10:15 Session 11

09:00 → 09:45 Talk 11: The Cosmic Microwave Background

This talk reviews the current status of observations of the cosmic microwave background and prospects for the next few years with emphasis on polarization observations.

Speaker: George Smoot

Slides TALK11_Smoot.pdf

09:45 → 10:15 Discussion 11

Speaker: Andreas Burkert

10:15 → 10:45 Coffee break

10:45 → 12:00 Session 12

10:45 → 11:30 Talk 12: Dark matter: candidates and detection methods

With the LHC soon starting, and many new methods of detecting dark matter are reaching into theoretically interesting parameter regions, the hunt for finding the identity of dark matter is entering a crucial stage. A review of some of the more frequently discussed candidates and detection methods will be given.

Speaker: Lars Bergström

Slides TALK12_Bergstrom.pdf

11:30 → 12:00 Discussion 12

Speaker: Wilfried Buchmüller

12:00 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 14:45 Session 13

13:30 → 14:15 Talk 13: The breaking of CP and flavor symmetries

Within the Standard Model flavor and CP symmetries are broken only by the Yukawa interaction. Recent experimental results on the decays of “beauty” and “strange” quarks confirm this mechanism, and put stringent constraints on possible new flavor and CP symmetry-breaking terms. We discuss the consequences of these results for extensions of the Standard Model with new degrees of freedom around the TeV scale. We also outline the importance of future low-energy experiments, both in the quark and in the lepton sector, in shedding light on this problem.

Speaker: Gino Isidori

Slides TALK13_Isidori.pdf

14:15 → 14:45 Discussion 13

Speaker: Andrzej Buras

14:45 → 15:15 Coffee break

15:15 → 16:30 Session 14

15:15 → 16:00 Talk 14: The origin of the highest energy particles

After almost a century of observations, the ultra-high energy sky has finally displayed an anisotropic distribution. A significant correlation between the arrival directions of ultra-high cosmic rays measured by the Pierre Auger Observatory and the distribution of nearby active galactic nuclei signals the dawn of particle astronomy. These historic results have important implications to both astrophysics and particle physics.

Speaker: Angela Olinto

Slides TALK14_Olinto.ppt

16:00 → 16:30 Discussion 14

Speaker: Masahiro Teshima

Slides TALK14_Teshima.pdf

16:30 → 17:45 Session 15

16:30 → 17:15 Talk 15: Big Bang Nucleosynthesis: status of concordance

An overview of the standard model of big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) in the post-WMAP era is presented. With the value of the baryon-to-photon ratio determined to relatively high precision by WMAP, standard BBN no longer has any free parameters. In this context, the theoretical prediction for the abundances of D, He-3, He-4, Li-6, and Li-7 is discussed. The observational determination of the light nuclides is also discussed. Emphasis is placed on systematic uncertainties in He-4 observations and the present Li-7 discrepancy. Possible explanations for the latter are reviewed.

Speaker: Keith Olive

Slides TALK15_Olive.pdf

17:15 → 17:45 Discussion 15

Speaker: Gary Steigman

Slides TALK15_Steigman.pdf

17:45 → 18:00 Closing remarks and farewells