Events at Physics |
Events on Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
- Chaos & Complex Systems Seminar
- Recent changes in Wisconsin's forests as seen by satellites
- Time: 12:05 pm
- Place: 4274 Chamberlin
- Speaker: Mutlu Ozdogan, UW Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology
- Abstract: Wisconsin's forests are changing rapidly as a result of commercial harvest, disease and climate. However, these changes are captured only at the county or at the national forest scales and thus are not suitable for local scale hydrological, biological, and climate studies. Using satellite observations spanning three decades, we are developing stand-level forest change maps at five-year intervals for northern Wisconsin. Our maps show that commercial forest harvesting is a major form of disturbance in northern forests and as a result, the size of contiguous intact forest blocks that are important for habitat and hydrological connectivity are diminishing. The seminar will walk the audience through some historical perspective on forest harvesting in Wisconsin, show the impact of satellite technology in mapping harvested blocks, and discuss the implications of forest change.
- Host: Clint Sprott
- Theory Seminar (High Energy/Cosmology)
- Signals of CP Violation Beyond the MSSM in Higgs and Flavor Physics
- Time: 4:00 pm
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin
- Speaker: Stefania Gori, University of Chicago
- Abstract: We study an extension of the Higgs sector of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), considering the effects arising from new degrees of freedom at the TeV scale that are carrying new sources of CP violation beyond the MSSM. The new sources of CP violation have a strong impact on Higgs collider phenomenology and on low energy flavor and CP violating observables. Two striking Higgs benchmark scenarios are identified: a scenario with three neutral Higgs bosons that all decay dominantly into W boson pairs and a scenario with three relatively heavy Higgs bosons (~150 GeV) decaying dominantly into b bbar. We finally investigate the predictions of the model for those flavor observables that still allow the presence of sizable new physics effects while being compatible with the experiments. A particular emphasis is given to the rare decay Bs->mu mu and to the Bs mixing phase.