【星海学者】关于 Adam Hincks博士非会议来访及学术交流活动的通知

● 来访学者信息/ Bio

Adam Hincks is an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. He has a PhD in Physics from Princeton University and did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia. He is a member of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, the Simons Observatory (SO) collaboration and the Hydrogen Intensity and Real-Time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX) collaboration. His research group develops data acquisition and processing software for these experiments, probes the distribution of baryons in large scale structure using the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, and explores the variable and transient millimeter-wave sky using ACT—and soon SO—data.

● 日程安排/ Agenda

● 报告题目和摘要/ Title and abstract:

Seminar 1: New Prospects for the Universe's Oldest Light with the Simons Observatory

Abstract:

Tiny ripples, or anisotropies, in the brightness of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), emitted soon after the big bang, hold a wealth of information on the origins, composition and evolution of the Universe. Since the CMB anisotropies were first detected by the COBE satellite more than 30 years ago, they have been observed with greater and greater precision. Amazingly, though, a lot of fundamental cosmological and astrophysical information can still be uncovered by more sensitive measurements of small angular scales and of the polarized signal of the CMB. This is the task of the new, multi-telescope Simons Observatory (SO) located in the Atacama desert, which is the most sensitive CMB experiment ever built. In this talk, I will introduce the SO instrument and mission, and then describe some of its promised science, including how better measurements of the CMB will allow us to test the hypothesis that cosmic inflation produced the Universe’s initial conditions, enable us to measure the mass of the neutrino and help us constrain the nature of dark matter and dark energy, in addition to unlocking other areas of cosmology and astrophysics such as searching for the ‘missingbaryons’ in large scale structure and studying transient and variable objects at millimeter wavelengths.

Seminar 2: Discovering Transients and Studying Supermassive Black Holes with Cosmology Telescopes

Abstract:

Wide-area cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys are designed for precision cosmology, but also provide unique opportunities for time domain astronomy at millimeter (mm) wavelengths. In this talk, I will describe how we have used the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), and can soon use the Simons Observatory (SO), to search for transient phenomena like stellar flares, tidal disruption events (TDEs) and gamma ray bursts (GRBs), to study pulsars and magnetars, and to monitor the variable brightness of blazars. I will also describe ACT’s observations of two supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) candidates and explain how SO is poised to discover and characterize dozens of SMBHB systems by monitoring of blazar variability.

● 其他

1. 欢迎全体师生积极参与学术报告和科研讨论，并鼓励与来访学者交流互动，共同探讨科研问题。

2. 此次来访是与国外学者建立长期合作的良好契机，请大家充分利用此次机会与来访学者探讨合作方向，推动形成论文等合作成果。