Integrated Calendar

I discuss phenomenological consequences in collider physics of the Higgs boson arising from enhanced down, up, strange, and charm Yukawa couplings. I highlight a possible induced modification of the charge asymmetry in $W^+ h$ vs.~$W^- h$ production as a result of large, enhanced Yukawa couplings. This motivates a collider study of the same-sign lepton final state, $p p o W^pm h o ell^pm
u ell^pm
u jj$, which can serve as a Standard Model discovery scenario for the $W^pm h$ production mode with 100 fb$^{-1}$ luminosity. We find the prospects of this final state as a probe of nonstandard Yukawa couplings, however, are diminished unless the Higgs couplings to vector bosons are increased beyond the SM expectation or the extra increase in the Higgs width from the enhanced Yukawas is simultaneously mitigated. I also briefly discuss the concomitant effects of new $s$-channel Higgs production from enhanced light quark Yukawa couplings.

As signals progress along the early visual system, they undergo a remarkable transformation. One synapse away from the eye, in Lateral Geniculate Nucleus, responses are still highly repeatable, and they can be predicted fairly well by simple model of image processing. One further synapse away, in Primary Visual Cortex (V1), responses become hugely affected by activity that originates within the brain, which varies from trial to trial, and can be closely related to behavior. For instance, a major factor that controls responses of neurons in the mouse visual cortex is locomotion. In mouse V1, locomotion changes the nature of spatial integration, reducing the strength of lateral interactions. Moreover, locomotion interacts with vision to affect responses during navigation, perhaps to help the animal estimate is own movement. In the parietal visual areas that follow V1 a further factor affecting responses is decision. The activity of neurons in those areas thus reflects the interactions of vision, decision, and navigation. Current efforts in our laboratory are aimed at studying these interactions.

I will review some recent results about the molecular content of galaxies across the Hubble time. Molecular gas is essential to determine the star formation efficiency in galaxies, and understand their evolution. Large progress has been made on galaxy at moderate and high redshifts, allowing to interprete the star formation history of the universe: in massive galaxies, the gas fraction was ~5 times higher in the past, and galaxy disks were more unstable and more turbulent. Molecular outflows are now frequently discovered in AGN-hosts, able to quench star formation. AGN feedback is required to reproduce the observed galaxy mass function.
ALMA observations will allow the study of main sequence galaxies at high z with higher spatial resolution and sensitivity.

Animals that live in groups sense their surroundings by direct environmental cues and indirect social interactions. Interaction rates within a dense insect society can be huge. Although the information conveyed in such interactions is advantageous, its sheer amounts could lead to excessive cognitive loads. It is therefore interesting to identify communication schemes that balance the advantages of sharing large amounts of information with the required conciseness of both memory and messaging.
I will discuss a simple theoretical model, inspired by observations from cooperating ants, where efficient collective performance can be achieved despite huge compression of memory and communication. This is accomplished by individuals that remember and communicate their opinion along with a related confidence measure. We conclude that for strongly cooperative groups, confidence expands its classical definition as a passive, internal state: ants enhance group performance by actively sharing their confidence.

The vertebrate nose is arguably the best chemical detector on the planet. It is estimated to be able to detect between 1 million and 1 trillion small molecules, known as odors. More importantly it can discriminate between hundred of thousands of these molecules, some differing by only a carbon atom. It performs this task using a large family of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) in the periphery and a surprisingly shallow circuit of only two synapses to olfactory cortex. A considerable challenge, and interesting puzzle, in olfaction is how the brain uses neural space to encode a distinctly non-spatial stimulus. Unlike the other senses olfactory stimuli vary along multiple dimensions and do not lend themselves to a spatial representation. New approaches to odor classification in the periphery, along with recent data on pyriform (olfactory) cortex developed in numerous laboratories regarding suggest novel solutions to this problem. These “olfactory solutions” may be seen operating in other brain systems as well.