Description:

"Engineering Order with Disorder in Superfluid 3He"
Andrew Zimmerman

3He is a model system for studying the physics of interacting fermions, providing an ideal analogue to systems as such as superconductors and neutron stars. It has been discovered that high porosity silica aerogel provides a means to study the effects of disorder introduced into this pure system. In this talk, I will describe how we can use well-controlled impurities from aerogel structures to engineer the ordered superfluid states in 3He and stabilize phases that do not exist in the absence of disorder.

"Interpreting the Massive Gas Flows Around Galaxies"
Zach Hafen

I use supercomputer simulations to build a cohesive picture of one of the most fundamental, yet mysterious, structures in our Universe, the circumgalactic medium. The circumgalactic medium consists of immense halos of gas that envelop each galaxy, including the one in which we live.

The study of the circumgalactic medium is in its infancy and only in the past few years have astrophysicists started to realize the colossal role it plays in the history of the Universe. My research aims to eliminate the primary roadblock to understanding the circumgalactic medium: determining how to use the limited information observed by astrophysicists to create a comprehensive description of the circumgalactic medium and its role in cosmic evolution. To do this, I take observations of the circumgalactic medium obtained using the world's most powerful ground- and space-based telescopes and compare them with my simulations. Since the simulations provide a physical context for the observed circumgalactic gas, this link between observations and simulations enables me to derive a much more complete physical picture of the circumgalactic medium.