Description:

Michael Zevin, Graduate Student
"Gravitational Wave Astronomy"

The recent direct observations of gravitational waves by advanced LIGO have initiated a new field of observational astronomy. Besides providing the discovery of binary black hole systems in our universe, gravitational waves will allow us to further explore massive-star evolution and the formation channels that produce binary compact objects. In this talk, I will highlight how we are currently investigating these topics, both by analyzing "outlier" signals that can only be generated by a single formation channel and by comparing the properties of simulated compact binary populations with those extracted from gravitational-wave detections. By pairing simulated populations of LIGO sources with gravitational-wave detections, we aim to disentangle the relative rates of various proposed formation channels and constrain uncertain physical processes that govern stellar evolution.

Keenan Avers, Graduate Student
"Small-Angle Neutron Scattering on Uranium Platinum-3"

The unconventional multi-phase superconductor Uranium Platinum three, UPt3, displays a wide range of properties not seen in conventional superconductors. Among those properties is chirality which implies the breaking of time reversal symmetry. This time reversal symmetry breaking manifests in a spontaneous, quantized angular momentum fixed parallel or anti-parallel to the c- axis of UPt3's crystal structure. This angular momentum results in a magnetic field history dependence to the vortex lattice that we are able to probe using Small Angle Neutron Scattering
(SANS). The field history dependence disappears above a field magnitude of 1.55 T that we interpret to be the phase transition from the time reversal breaking superconducting phase to a time reversal invariant superconducting phase.