A NSF Physics Frontier Center Annual Report 2005-2006
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A NSF Physics Frontier Center Annual Report 2005-2006 June 29, 2006 i Table of Contents 1 Executive Summary 1 2 Research Accomplishments and Plans 4 2.a Major Research Accomplishments . 4 2.a.1 Research Highlights . 4 2.a.2 Detailed Research Activities: MRC I- Theory . 5 2.a.3 Detailed Research Activities: MRC II- Structures in the Uni- verse ..................................... 20 2.a.4 Detailed Research Activities: MRC III - Cosmic Radiation Backgrounds ................................ 24 2.a.5 Detailed Research Activities: MRC IV - Particles from Space . 28 2.a.6 References . 32 2.b Research Organizational Details . 33 2.c Plans for the Coming Year . 33 3 Publications, Awards and Technology Transfers 40 3.a List of Publications in Peer Reviewed Journals . 40 3.b List of Publications in Peer Reviewed Conference Proceedings . 48 3.c Invited Talks by Institute Members . 52 3.d Honors and Awards . 56 3.e Technology Transfer . 57 4 Education and Human Resources 58 4.a Graduate and Postdoctoral Training . 58 4.a.1 Research Training . 58 4.a.2 Curriculum Development: . 62 4.b Undergraduate Education . 63 4.b.1 Undergraduate Research Experiences: . 63 4.b.2 Undergraduate Curriculum Development: . 64 4.c Educational Outreach . 65 4.c.1 K-12 Programs: Space Explorers . 66 4.c.2 Web-Based Educational Activities: . 69 4.c.3 Other: . 69 4.d Enhancing Diversity . 72 5 Community Outreach and Knowledge Transfer 74 5.a Visitor Participation in Center . 74 5.a.1 Long term visitors . 74 5.a.2 Short term and seminar visitors . 75 5.b Workshops and Symposia . 79 5.b.1 Santa Fe 2005 Cosmology Summer Workshop, St. John’s College . 79 5.b.2 Big Bang & Beyond, 21st Century Cosmology . 80 5.b.3 New Views of the Universe: KICP Inaugural Symposium in honor of David Schramm: . 80 5.b.4 Cosmic microwave background: now and in the Future . 80 5.b.5 Auger North Design Workshop . 80 5.b.6 Auger South Analysis Meeting . 81 5.c Web based activities-website . 81 5.d Collaboration with Other Sectors . 81 6 Personnel and Management 82 6.a Center Organization and Management Structure . 82 6.a.1 Internal and Advisory Committees . 82 6.b Biographical Information . 83 7 Fiscal Information 84 7.a Statement of Unobligated Funds . 84 7.b Revised Budget . 84 7.c Cost Sharing . 84 7.d Leverage . 84 7.e Current and Pending Support . 84 iii List of Tables List of Figures 1 New robust mass indicator for clusters . 10 2 Simulating mergers of galaxies with Supermassive Black holes . 11 3 SDSS-II Discovers Supernovae . 12 4 First Auger Spectrum . 13 5 First COUPP results . 13 6 Environmental dependence of halo occupation distribution . 14 7 Comparison of galaxy clustering in SDSS and in Simulations . 15 8 Luminosity function . 16 9 Gravity wave signatures of BH seed formation . 16 10 Clusters Distances and Gas Mass fractions. 25 11 SZA CL0016+16 Mosaic. 26 12 Progress on the South Pole Telescope . 26 13 QUaD E/B maps . 36 14 QUIET 7-element test array. 37 15 Stokes Q and U time-streams for one QUIET module in the Chicago Optimizer. 38 16 FSB response as a function of input power. 38 17 First results from COUPP: . 39 18 Neutrino-Nucleus scattering detector: . 39 19 PFC Organizational chart . 83 1 Executive Summary Here we summarize the major developments in the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics during the 5th year of funding. KICP continues to attract the highest quality of young scientists in cosmological physics. As in past years KICP conducted a broadly advertised search for recent PhD’s in Physics, Astrophysics and related fields for the KICP Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. We received over 160 appli- cations from all over the world, but ultimately identified a list of the top seven applicants, in five sub-areas of cosmology, ranked by academic and research record and by interests and abilities that best matched the research activities within KICP. As with the previous years, we were successful in attracting the most highly qualified researcher from the pool, that will join KICP in the Fall of 2006. Brant Robertson will received his Ph.D this Spring from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Robertson was ranked the strongest Ph.D graduating in computational cosmology in the world this year. He stood out due to his rare combination of remarkable technical and in- tellectual abilities, and scientific intuition and maturity. During his graduate studies, Robertson co-authored 18 papers in the field of galaxy formation and Cold Dark Matter structure formation, which already generated more that 400 citations. He also simultaneously built, administered and maintained the computing cluster at Harvard’s Center for Parallel Astrophysical Computing in 2002-2004. His scientific interests fit well within the computation cosmology efforts in KICP and his talents should contribute substantially to the new computing initiative of the KICP. Robertson also was awarded a Spitzer Fellowship which he will bring to the KICP. We had also offered a fellowship to Eric Armengaud who had just received his Ph.D in the Summer 2006 from the As- troParticules et Cosmologie (APC) and Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (IAP). Armengaud also accepted our offer and was ready to come to the US for 3 years when he recently informed us that he has received a permanent appointment in France (a very rare situation for a new Ph.D.) He of course cannot turn down such a possibility and so will not join us next year. Four of our postdoctoral fellows have moved to other institutions since the last report in May 2005: Thushara Perera completed his 3 year term at KICP in August 2005 and took a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Massachusettes at Amherst. Dorothea Samtleben completed her term at KICP in December 2005 and moved to a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Bonn. Erin Sheldon completed his 3 year term at KICP in August 2005 and took a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University. Andrew Sonnenschein completed his 3 year term at KICP in October 2005 and moved to a Wilson Fellowship at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. In addition KICP Fellow and Hubble Fellow Risa Wechsler was offered faculty positions at the Astronomy Department at Penn State, the Physics Department at The University of Michigan and a joint faculty position between the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) and the Physics Department at Stanford University and on the faculty at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). She recently accepted the offer at Stanford/SLAC/KIPAC and will start in the Fall 2006. Christopher Gordon will complete his 3 year term at KICP at the end of September 2006, he has accepted a long term Fellowship at Oxford University, UK, to start in October 2006. Andrew Zentner was offered faculty positions at Rutgers University and University of Pittsburg - which he has accepted with a deferred start date of late 2007. He also received a NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship which he has chosen to take at KICP for the next few years. Our graduate students have performed exceptionally well in their searches for postdoctoral positions: Argyro Tasitsiomi graduated in November 2005 took a Lyman Spitzer postdoctoral Fel- lowship at Princeton University. Daisuke Nagai graduated in August 2005 is now the Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar in Theoretical Astrophysics at Caltech. Jennifer Chen graduated in 1 December 2005 and moved to a Lecturer in Physics position at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Vikram Duuvuri graduated in June 2005 and took a postdoctoral position in Instituto Superior Tech- nico in Lisbon, Portugal. Stelios Kazantzidis won a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowhip which he took at KICP from August 2005-May 2006. He moved to a KIPAC postdoctoral Fellow- ship at Stanford University in May 2006. Eduardo Rozo will graduate in Summer 2006 and has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Ohio State University. Rozo was also awarded the Sugarman Award for outstanding thesis research by the Enrico Fermi Institute. Zhaoming Ma will graduate in Summer 2006 and has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at The University of Pennsylvania. Jacqueline Chen will graduate in Summer 2006 and has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Heidelberg. Graduate student Kendrick Smith was awarded the Bloomenthal Gradu- ate student Fellowship of the Physics Department which will support him for the final year of his thesis research. This past year we have financially supported (either fully or partially) 14 postdoctoral fellows from PFC funds and have 7 other postdoctoral fellows working on our research project (including 2 Hubble Fellows and one NSF AAPF). We have 40 graduate students working on research projects with our faculty , including three visiting graduate students. Of these we provided partial or full finacial support for 32 students. Postdoctoral researchers and graduate students supported by KICP are listed in Table 2. 12 undergraduates (including one summer REU student) and one local high school student worked through the year on long-tem research projects with our faculty and were supported by PFC funds (see Table 3). During this past year KICP members have co-authored greater than 100 publications for peer reviewed journals and publications for conference proceedings and books. This is a dramatic illustration of the strength of our educational and research programs. Below we list the main research highlights which are described in greater detail in § 2.a.1 and § 2.a.3. • A new robust X-ray mass indicator for galaxy clusters from the work of Kravtsov, Nagai and Vikhlinin. • A study of the existence of fossil galaxies in the Local Group by Kravtsov and Gnedin.