Donnerstag, 9. Oktober 2025 17:30 Uhr Particle physics: today and tomorrow
Prof. Dr. Mark Thomson, CERN
Prof. Dr. Mark Thomson, CERN
Chilufya Mwewa Kapya, DESY Hamburg
Daniel Price, Monash University Take a molecular cloud, collapse it to form a star and the leftover material will form planets. Sounds easy, right? But even our own solar system is riddled with clues that forming stars and planets is a bit. more. complicated. It turns out that accreting gas to form any small object is hard. Accreting gas at the rate needed to form the Sun in a few hundred thousand years is even harder. None of this is new. What is new is the observational revolution of the last 10 years, showing us the insides of protoplanetary discs, bringing fresh clues as to how both stars and exoplanets form [seemingly, together]. This has dramatic implications for our understanding of how accretion works. I will argue that the typical pathway to form stars and planets is a violent mess, imprinted in subtle and not-so-subtle ways on disc observations and also in the leftovers from our solar system’s formation. The story is misaligned flow, accretion streamers, infall, warps and variability. If you don’t care about stars or planets but the story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not so different for making black holes or galaxies either...
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Alberto Sartori, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy Source-Detector Framework for BEC Analogue Models of Gravity Alberto Sartori Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy Two-level impurities in Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) analogues of gravity act as localized source-detector probes for the emergent field theory in curved spacetime. Emphasizing source terms and Green functions, rather than field quantization, allows one to obtain a practical, measurement-oriented framework that (1) localizes and characterizes the quasinormal modes (QNMs) of the field, (2) visualizes QNMs excitation mechanisms, (3) quantifies their influence on spontaneous emission rates (Purcell effect), and (4) treats quantum processes on non-static backgrounds where a preferred vacuum state is ambiguous. I will present and explain the key methods of the framework, along with notable numerical results from my M.Sc. thesis (supervisor: Prof. Iacopo Carusotto, Trento BEC Center), and predictions for potential BEC experiments, with the aim of exploring how analogue gravity and impurity dynamics may offer insights into open quantum systems.
