Northwestern Events Calendar

Dec
1
2016

Joseph Mercado and Fani Dosopoulou

When: Thursday, December 1, 2016
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM CT

Where: Technological Institute, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Cost: Pizza provided

Contact: Bud Robinson   (847) 491-3644

Group: Physics and Astronomy PAECRS

Category: Academic

Description:

“Ultracold Chemistry in a Hybrid Trap”
Joseph Cordero Mercado

The increasing complexity of molecules have made them challenging to control. Recent advancements in the control and manipulation of them has awaken interest to study them in the context of quantum information, precision measurements and quantum chemistry. In this talk I will present some of the techniques that have been used to manipulate atoms that enables us to study molecules in the context of ultracold chemical reactions.

“Dynamical Friction and the Evolution of Supermassive Black Hole Binaries: The Final Hundred-Parsec Problem”
Fani Dosopoulou
The massive black holes originally in the nuclei of two merging galaxies will form a binary in the core of the merger remnant. The early evolution of the massive binary is driven by dynamical friction before the binary becomes “hard” and eventually reaches coalescence through the emission of gravitational wave radiation. We use analytical models and direct N-body integrations to study the evolution of supermassive black hole binaries due to dynamical friction. We find that the eccentricity of a massive binary increases due to dynamical friction if the density profile of the surrounding stellar cusp is shallow. For these cusps the dynamical friction timescale can become very long and sufficiently low mass ratio binaries in sufficiently massive host galaxies have decay timescales that are longer than one Hubble time. During such minor mergers the secondary hole stalls on an eccentric orbit at a galactocentric distance of order one tenth the influence radius of the primary black hole. We calculate the expected average number of stalled satellites as a function of the host galaxy black hole mass, and find that the brightest cluster galaxies should have a few satellites orbiting within their inner cores. I will discuss the implications of this study for a number of observational puzzles, which include double structures or the presence of multiple nuclei in core elliptical galaxies, as well as off-center active galactic nuclei and eccentric nuclear disks.

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