Physics across thirty orders of magnitude in time

Abstract: 

This talk is a double feature, beginning with "oscilloscope on chip" instrumentation and finishing with stellar remnant phenomenology over cosmic time.  The Large Area Picosecond Photo-Detector (LAPPD) is an attractive single photon detection technology when high surface area and low noise are design requirements.  The Instrumentation Development Lab (IDLAB) at U. Hawaii, in collaboration with Ultralytics, LLC., has developed "plug-n-play," low-power, 5 GSPS readout electronics that mount directly to Incomm LAPPDs for a maximally compact form factor.  We give an overview of this project, with emphasis on open-source software for configuration, control, and data acquisition at > 1Mpps using only commodity hardware. Roughly thirteen orders of magnitude slower in time, gravitational waveform observations from LIGO/Virgo and radio interferometry from the Event Horizon Telescope confirm that BHs are universally well-described by the Kerr solution.  The Kerr solution, however, is incompatible with our expanding universe on timescales comparable to the reciprocal expansion rate.  Known solutions with realistic boundary conditions can interact strongly with the universe at large, leading to numerous, testable, observational consequences in astrophysical systems ranging from the merging stellar mass binaries observable with LIGO/Virgo to ancient quasars.  We review the theoretical and observational status of one such phenomenon, cosmological coupling, and argue that the masses of BHs everywhere maybe always growing, without any accretion at all.

Speaker : 

Kevin Croker

Location: 

CENPA Conference Room NPL-178

Material: