Integrated Calendar

Over 300 million people worldwide currently suffer from asthma, and the prevalence of asthma and other allergic diseases has been increasing in recent decades. While it is clear that fungal exposure is an important component to allergic diseases, many epidemiological studies that have examined the link between allergies, asthma, and the presence of fungi have struggled to elucidate clear relationships. Inherent biases in standard, culture-based environmental fungal measurement methods do not allow for an accurate accounting of environmental fungal population diversity or physiology. This talk will describe how our group is addressing these current measurement biases, firstly through the application of high-throughput DNA sequencing to catalog the size-resolved fungal diversity in the atmosphere, and secondly through gene expression and proteomic approaches to investigate how environmental changes such as reduced air quality and variable temperature may impact the physiology and thus potency of fungal allergens.

The Higgs boson discovery is the experimentum crucis for the Standard Model (SM) which explains in a magnificent way the basic constituents of matter and their interactions. The hunt for the Higgs Boson is stretching already for over two decades. Now, with the Large Hadron (LHC) Collider, both ATLAS and CMS are setting stringest limits on its mass, and its discovery is anticipated in the coming year. The status of the ongoing Higgs search at the LHC, and its near future prospects and implications are de-scribed first hand

Quantum walks describe the random walk behavior of a quantum particle. When a single photon propagates in an array of coupled optical waveguides, it actually performs a quantum random walk. Photons propagating in such systems evolve in close analogy with electron transport in crystals: Both are modeled by the same tight-binding approximation. This enabled in recent years the direct observations and detailed study of basic condense matter phenomena, from Bloch Oscillations to Anderson Localization. The simultaneous quantum walk of several indistinguishable photons show unique and interesting quantum features in their correlation functions. I will discuss the evolving correlations in periodic and disordered lattices and the recent observation of topological states in photonic quasi-crystals.

We use the Aquarius simulations to show that the most massive subhalos in galaxy-mass dark matter halos in LCDM are grossly inconsistent with the dynamics of the brightest Milky Way dwarf spheroidal galaxies. While the best-fitting hosts of the dwarf spheroidals all have 12 < Vmax < 25 km/s, LCDM simulations predict at least ten subhalos with Vmax > 25 km/s. These subhalos are also among the most massive at earlier times, and significantly exceed the UV suppression mass back to z ~ 10. No LCDM-based model of the satellite population of the Milky Way explains this result. The problem lies in the satellites' densities: it is straightforward to match the observed Milky Way luminosity function, but doing so requires the dwarf spheroidals to have dark matter halos that are a factor of ~5 more massive than is observed. Independent of the difficulty in explaining the absence of these dense, massive subhalos, there is a basic tension between the derived properties of the bright Milky Way dwarf spheroidals and LCDM expectations. The inferred infall masses of these galaxies are all approximately equal and are much lower than standard LCDM predictions for systems with their luminosities. Consequently, their implied star formation efficiencies span over two orders of magnitude, from 0.2% to 20% of baryons converted into stars, in stark contrast with expectations gleaned from more massive galaxies. We explore possible solutions to these problems within the context of LCDM and find them to be unconvincing. In particular, we use controlled simulations to demonstrate that the small stellar masses of the bright dwarf spheroidals make supernova feedback an unlikely explanation for their low inferred densities.