JILA Auditorium

Abstract: How much will Earth warm in response to increasing carbon dioxide emissions?  Climate projections are highly uncertain yet have important societal implications.  Climate models are the most effective tools for making climate projections, however, their ability to reliably project climate has been hindered primarily by challenges in representing clouds in Earth’s atmosphere.  Cold clouds composed of supercooled liquid droplets and ice crystals are particularly challenging to represent in climate models due to the large number of complex micro-s

Abstract: For the past four decades, the Space Telescope Science Institute has served as the bridge between NASA's flagship astrophysics missions and the scientific community through its role as the science operations center for Hubble, Webb, and Roman. The Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 35th year of operations, and continues to lead innovative new discoveries with its ultraviolet-optical capabilities and decades of high precision data.

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Future electronic and quantum devices will require near-atomically-precise nanofabrication processes, but present plasma processing methods create a variety of imperfections that limit device performance. In this talk, I will present atomic layer etching processing for materials including superconducting titanium nitride, lithium niobate, and compound semiconductors which enable etching with Angstrom-scale precision. I will also describe our efforts to validate the process improvements at the device level.

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Abstract: Thorne-Zytkow objects (TZOs) - stars with the outward appearance of red supergiants supported by neutron degenerate cores - are some of the most mysterious and compelling stars in the universe. Thought to be formed from the mergers of binary massive stars, they represent a completely new model for stable stellar interiors, a distinct evolutionary channel for massive binaries and compact objects, and a novel channel for producing the heavy elements that have enriched our universe.

Abstract: NASA's latest great flagship observatory, JWST, was built in part to reveal the earliest moments of cosmic history. In the ~2 years since it began releasing data to the public, JWST has enthralled scientists and the public alike with the incredible images and spectroscopic information from astronomical objects as nearby as our solar system and beyond to the most distant reaches of the Universe.

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Abstract: Inflationary cosmology has been widely accepted for decades. Yet there are persistent debates about inflation which raise central questions in philosophy of science. Skeptics have often expressed doubt regarding whether inflation is "testable" or "falsifiable," due to the flexibility of inflationary models. This is an instance of a general question in philosophy of science: to what extent does phenomenological success support the claim that a theory gets the physics right?