Place: 4421 Sterling Hall, Cookies and Coffee 3:30 PM, Talk begins at 4:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Amiel Sternberg, Tel Aviv University, Max Planck Inst. for Extraterrestrial Physics, Germany, Flatiron Institute, Simons Foundation USA
Abstract: The atomic to molecular hydrogen (HI-to-H2) phase transition is of fundamental importance for star-formation and the emergence of chemical complexity in the interstellar medium of galaxies. I will present an overview, and discuss recent theoretical studies, numerical and analytic, of the HI-to-H2 transition in irradiated systems, with applications to the multi-scale behavior observed in star-forming galaxy disks from low- to high-redshift.