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December 9, 2022 past

PUG Seminar - James Gurian

321 Whitmore

PUG Seminar - James Gurian

Title: Zero Metallicity in Zero CPU Hours

Abstract: I will begin with a pedagogical review of the theory of the formation of the first stars and the current open questions in the field. I will then present a new, analytic model for the formation of these stars which clarifies the essential physics. Despite its simplicity, this model agrees with the stellar mass predicted by expensive radiation-hydrodynamical simulations to within a factor of a few over the entire relevant parameter space.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2022-12-02 14:00 James Gurian Topic to be announced
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.