KITP
catdynamics | March 29, 2010Dave Charbonneau: why transits are cool
Kicking off afternoon session is Josh Winn on transit uses and abuses.
Then Gaspar Bakos on ground based transits.
you get masses, and planetary radii.
Can go to low masses and close in planets, and working to earth masses in habitable zone - Real Soon Now
as Dave says, it will be a current or near future graduate student who gets the first peek at a true Earth
also, transiting planets offer quick opportunity for spectra through differential transiting spectra of the host star.
Should work for Neptunes, then waterworld Super-Earths.
Dave beats up…
catdynamics | March 29, 2010Debra Fischer talking about correlations between metallicity and mass of stars and planets
Two samples: Coralie data from Santos et al and Lick/Keck data
need to get uniform sampled subsets, looking at giant mass planets
known (cf Santos et al 2004, Fischer & Valenti 2005, Udry & Santos 2007)
trend to N ~ Z2
for short orbital period giant planets over -0.5 < Z < +0.5
everyone is redoing their analysis, remeasuring Z and making use of bigger samples, longer observing stretches and higher velocity sensitivity (and hence lower mass planets)
surface gravity, g, confounds Teff…
catdynamics | March 29, 2010Marcy next, talking about the ηEarth survey with the Keck.
simulations, under certain assumptions, predict a "planet desert"
roughly for mass range 1-10 MEarth and 0.1-1 AU or so
can populate the desert with some fine tuning of migration parameters etc
but still noticeable deficiency of moderate mass planets
very assumption dependent
best tested through observations
cf Lin & Ida, and Mordasini et al.
But, as Mayor just said, there are loads of planets in that mass range in that orbital range...
Keck sample of 238 G/K/M main sequence stars, looking for 3-30 MEarth stars. Quiet, nearby…
catdynamics | March 29, 2010Well, I'm back at the Kavli Institute attending the Exoplanets Rising workshop.
We have a full schedule of talks over the week, and I'll be intermittently blogging the events as we amble along.
Bunch of interesting sounding talk on the schedule, and hopefully some interesting news and discoveries that we will hear about.
We kick-off this morning with Mayor and Marcy, and the Fischer and Charbonneau after the break, looking forward to it.
Not seen planets around M dwarfs with mass less than 0.3 solar masses, but that is likely a bias - lower mass dwarfs are fainter, duh.
Talks will be online…
catdynamics | October 29, 2009
You either get this or you do not.
courtesy John F. (click to embiggen)
Loathe as I am to admit it, that is rather good.
Hm. E/mc √(-1) pV/nR is way too derivative.
Maybe Q/V √-1 pV/nR
Or,
Q/V √-1 4√(P/A ε σ)
yeah, that's the ticket!
nRT/V kBln(Ω) (TS - pV)
has potential though.
Especially in that nice blue & white.
Right sub-field also...
catdynamics | May 13, 2009Another topical colloquium here at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics...
"Money, It's a Gas"
New Developments in Statistical Mechanics of Money, Income, and Wealth (podcast, video, slides)
by Victor Yakovenko, University of Maryland.
Paper in Rev. Mod. Phys. (arXiv:0905.1518)
Money, of course, is not conserved.
It can be created, with some work,
and, famously, it can be destroyed.
Makes for interesting statistical mechanics, eh?
It turns out that putting a lower bound on net money per person was unphysical...
there is some interesting literature out there on the instability of…
catdynamics | May 10, 2009it turns out that hot tubs and light ashfall are a bad mix
so we had a fairly major fire here in the mountains;
one of my colleagues here pretty much saw it start - the site is clearly visible outside the "fishbowl tower room" where we were having a research group meeting.
He pointed it out to me a few minutes before 2, and the fire is thought to have started at 1:45 or so.
Fire wasn't much tuesday, but threatened some homes and had the potential to be very serious.
Wednesday we had a KITP picnic at the beach, with clear view of the fire.
The winds picked up and the fire got bad, but was…
catdynamics | May 7, 2009The Jesusita Fire in Santa Barbara has broken out and spread far west and south, situation is looking very serious, there will be a lot of loss tonight, evacuation orders extend to Goleta, refugees are moving to UCSB, and it may not be done yet.
It could be worse than the Tea Fire.
Well, I was right earlier this afternoon, when saw the fire's edge move west and the other side come south.
I had another social event this afternoon, and came out at UCSB campus shortly before sunset, the wind had shifted and we could see the western and southern edges of the flames.
It was a truly awesome sight…
catdynamics | May 7, 2009it is thursday afternoon, temperature is almost 100F
and the winds are picking up, right on schedule
looking through the window on the other side from my office I can see the fire flaring up
looks bad
It looks almost like there are 3-5 separate fires burning now, from my vantage.
Two are moving up the mountain, one on the north side in fresh bush, the other at the top of the canyons, and looks to have almost crested the mountain ridge - if it gets over into the backcountry we're in for a very long weekend... I gather a lot of the firefighter resources are up there on the ridge crest roads…
catdynamics | May 7, 2009 evolutionary dynamics of influenza!
and how flu immunity is defined by you Hamming distance in protein bit space
The Kavli Institute has a very interesting biophysics program series...
Last semester there was another interesting biophysics colloquium:
The Puzzle of the Evolutionary Dynamics of Influenza
Luca Peliti, Univ. Federico II (podcast, video, slides)
Very timely talk that.
Worth browsing through.
catdynamics | May 7, 2009Clone Wars: how are stockbrokers like colorectal cancer cells?
The Kavli Institute has a very interesting biophysics program series...
This weeks colloquium:
"Physics and Mathematics of Cancer Metastasis" - Robijn Bruinsma, UCLA, explains (NOT ONLINE YET podcast, video, slides)
excellent colloquium on "cancer for theorists"
including discussion of the basics of cancer and metastasis,
mathematics of cancer epidemiology,
including the Master Equation for microevolution of cancer cells,
and open questions
soon likely to be a KITP program...
bottom line: everyone will get cancer, eventually,…
catdynamics | May 6, 2009yesterday, as we were headed into an informal research group discussion,
one of the locals grabbed me and pointed out the window at a small plume of smoke on the mountain above Santa Barbara
it was a small brush fire in San Roque canyon, the Jesusita Fire, high on the mountain, it was warm and windy, but the fire was moving diagonally uphill and looked like it would be contained;
firecrews and helicopters were on it immediately
by night the fire looked to have died down, but with the heavy brush in the canyons, the firecrews couldn't form a line around the fire, and in the morning it flared…
catdynamics | May 4, 2009General introduction to optimal control theory and how to control matter at the quantum level
David Tannor gave the Director's Blackboard Talk at KITP today:
Quantum Control: From Chemistry to Cooling to Computing
Very nice talk, goes on a bit in the middle talking about the time dependent quantum mechanical picture vs use of phase control.
Very nice finish on mathematics of optimal control theory and the physical picture of how to use variational schemes to implement practical control.
Things I took away from this:
optimal control theory is underway but has a lot of open interesting…
catdynamics | April 28, 2009The Quantum Control of Light and Matter program is underway here at KITP and I'm sitting in on some of the talks.
with Keto-Eno-Tautomerie-Blues!
Auf Deutsch...
All I can say is, bloomin' heck, some interesting stuff that can be done now.
Not just moving atoms and entanglng qbits, but robust control of nuclear spin ensembles
I missed the Quantum Control by Laser Pulses by Manz and Barth (video, podcast, slides)
but I made it to
Glaser's "NMR Control Overview" (video, podcast)
it is a very long talk, but worth it for the end, where they show robust control of an ensemble of nuclear spins…
catdynamics | April 27, 2009The Kavli Institute has a new piece of kinetic art which has captured the attention of many of the locals...
Jean-Pierre, Kavli Institute artist in residence a cofounder of the algorists, recently put up a lovely piece at the bottom of the staircase at my end of the Institute.
It makes geometric patterns in sand, ever changing.
Some start off simple
but they move.
It is endlessly fascinating, the kids love it (sometimes a bit too much, but the patterns regenerate) and it has kept a number of physicists distracted while they try to figure out how he does it.
(I have a theory, based on…
catdynamics | April 13, 2009on that last good friday nine astronomers gathered for the last time for the dreaded 11 am rapid fire discussion session in the Founder's Room at the Kavli Institute
there were six degenerate faculty types
two post-AGB hot stars headed for the cooling sequence of the tenure track
and one lone sub-giant, fresh off the graduate main sequence...
we chatted a bit about Pismis 24
it is a very nice cluster
then, just as we were about to pack it up and go to lunch early,
Glenn brought up SN
again
ok, he had an idea,
ok, it was kinda an interesting idea,
ok, so some of us couldn't resist asking…
catdynamics | April 9, 2009So what did I learn...
Flying fish make great "rationality tokens"
Multiple Populations are probably real and a problem.
I owe Bob, Jay, Chris and others an apology, they've been saying this for decades...
Intermediate Mass Black Holes are Important and Interesting.
But, we need to calm down a little bit about them.
We don't understand as much as we used to.
Δ Y?
Really?
Maybe.
Interesting...
Somebody Really Really Really needs to go and compile a HST level quality, homogenous catalog of globular cluster parameters etc
Existing catalogs rely too much on heterogenous, largely pre-CCD…
catdynamics | April 9, 2009the Kavli Institute program on Dynamics and Evolution of Globular Clusters is reaching the end, and we highlight the important issues...
The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here, and we'll do the rest
Key topics:
Stellar Content
Present Day Mass Functions, M/L
Intermediate Mass Black Holes
Blue Stragglers
Binary Fraction
Planets
Multiple Populations: not just Δ Y
Funny IMF or Funny dynamics.
AGB or rapidly rotating high mass stars?
LMXBs, BHs, CVs
Structure
Milky Way Catalog
Models: King, Wilson etc
Surface Brightness Profile
Core Collapse, Post-Core Collapse…