2012-03-05

the Higgs, stellar modeling

Neil Weiner gave a great brown-bag (all chalk) talk about the Higgs at lunch today. He started from scratch: He started at the Lagrangian in field theory and ended up saying what the implications are for new physics (especially supersymmetry-like theories) of various different Higgs masses! And all in 50 minutes. It was a masterpiece, and hilarious to boot. Ask him for his joke about string theorists.

Before and after that, Hou showed us the results of fitting a stochastic stellar oscillation model to K-giant radial velocity data. We are hoping to show that including a physical model for surface variations will improve the results of exoplanet fitting. We can show this for fake data; now onto real data.

2 comments:

  1. Good to hear that the oscillation model is working out. Are you using the state space representations method (likelihood calcs take O(N)) or the naive "Gaussian process" method (O(N^3)) like I did?

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  2. @Brendon: Interesting! Let's discuss when you are here.

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