Zolotov

Zolotov (Hebrew) returned to NYU for a day for catching up. She is working on—among other things—the effect of dramatic baryonic evolution (star formation and supernovae) on the dark-matter halos of substructure within galaxies. She finds bigger effects than you might imagine, because although the baryons are a small fraction of each subhalo, they can undergo rapid evolution at very small scales and high densities. I pitched to her the idea of testing in her super-realistic simulations the strong dependence of scale height and scale length on metallicity and alpha-abundance that Bovy, Rix, and others (including me) find in the Milky Way disk (at least in the Solar Neighborhood). She ought to be able to see exactly the same effect in her simulations.

Procrastination on a large number of pressing items has led me to write a long document about probability calculus. I spent a lot of the weekend working on it, with a short diversion to Lang's place, where we talked about decision theory, among many other things. I am not sure it counts as research, but look for it on the arXiv sometime this semester.