Latest Past Events
CGCA Seminar – Abygail Waggoner
KIRC KEN 2175 3135 N. Maryland Ave., MilwaukeeWhat’s Feeding Terrestrial Planets? JWST Observations of Protoplanetary Disk
Dr. Abygail Waggoner
University of Wisconsin-Madison
The formation of terrestrial, or earth-like, planets is thought to occur in the inner few au of protoplanetary disks, but what is the composition of the dust and gas that forming-planets may inherit? In this talk, we’ll discuss how the James Webb Space Telescope can be used to measure the chemical composition of protoplanetary disk gas and how models can be used to understand the evolution of material throughout planet formation.
Physics Colloquium – Chris Fragile
Chemistry 108 2050 E Kenwood Blvd, MilwaukeeWhat Are We Learning About Super-Eddington Accretion Disks From Simulations?
Professor Chris Fragile
Department of Physics & Astronomy, College of Charleston
Accretion of gas onto black holes is one of the most important processes shaping our Universe. Understanding extremely high rates of accretion (dubbed 'super-Eddington') is vital to explaining the challenging observation that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are fully formed at redshifts >7. It is also important to understanding astrophysical objects such as tidal disruption events (TDEs) and ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs).
Physics Colloquium – Moritz Münchmeyer
Chemistry 108 2050 E Kenwood Blvd, MilwaukeeAI Reasoning in Theoretical Physics with the TPBench Project
Assistant Professor Moritz Münchmeyer
UW-Madison Department of Physics
Large-language models are becoming powerful enough to assist physicists with mathematical reasoning at the research level. In this talk, I will first present our dataset TPBench (tpbench.org), which was constructed to benchmark and improve AI models specifically for theoretical physics.