School of Natural Sciences

The search for signs of life beyond Earth is a key motivator in exoplanet research.  A suitable “biosignature gas” is one that: can accumulate in an atmosphere against atmospheric radicals and other sinks; has strong atmospheric spectral features...

Over a five-year period, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will spectroscopically classify nearly 40 million galaxies and quasars over 1/3 of the sky and to redshifts z 3.5. The DESI collaboration has completed measurements of the...

The possibility that some of the black holes in the universe have a non-stellar origin and that they play a significant role in cosmology - including being some or all of the dark matter - is both timely and intriguing. I will review the status of...

I will discuss dilaton gravity with a sine potential, where periodic shifts of the dilaton (that leave the potential invariant) are treated as a redundancy. Most things I will say hold true for generic periodic potentials, but the sine potential is...

Galaxies are at the core of nearly all modern astrophysical studies. They serve as essential cosmological probes, tracing the structure of the universe, while also providing the stage on which stars form and black holes grow. Despite their...

Stellar streams form as dwarf galaxies and globular clusters tidally disrupt around their host galaxy. To date, more than 100 streams have been detected around our Galaxy. In this talk, I will begin with an overview of how streams form, how they can...

This talk will discuss what's new with some of the most interesting looking cosmological tensions: the Hubble tension, the growth of structure tension (S8, growth rate, Lyman Alpha) and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (Lithium and Deuterium). Some of these...

Quantizing classical systems we consider Hilbert spaces equipped with representations of canonical commutation relations (CCR).  In the case of an infinite number of degrees of freedom it is necessary to consider representations of  CCR that are not...