HIP NEWS April 27th 2015
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Staff training: Welcome breakfast
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The course is targeted for all the new international employees of the University of Helsinki.
Register until 30.04.2015.
Sign up in http://www.helsinki.fi/trainingcalendar ( Staff Training Calendar HENKKA)
If you don’t have access to Henkka, please do the registration via this link by copying the address to your browser:
https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/56395/lomake.html

DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS / HIP JOINT COLLOQUIA / SEMINARS
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Tuesday 28 April 2015 at 10.15 in A315
Dorota Sokolowska (Warsaw)
Dark matter in multi-scalar extensions of the Standard Model with discrete symmetries

Abstract: Multi-scalar extensions of the Standard Model can accommodate a viable Dark Matter candidate and modification of Higgs decay rates, particularly into two photons. One of the simplest choices for the extended scalar sector is the Inert Doublet Model, i.e. the Standard Model with an additional inert scalar doublet. The IDM can be further extended by extra doublets or singlets, which may modify both DM- and collider phenomenology.
In this talk I will discuss the the interplay between the LHC results for the decay of the SM-like Higgs into two photons and the properties of Dark Matter from Planck measurements. Constraints for multi-scalar models obtained in this way are stronger or comparable to the constraints provided by direct and indirect detection experiments for low, medium and high Dark Matter mass regions.

The 2015 CERN-JINR European School of High-Energy Physics
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The 2015 European School of High-Energy Physics will take place in
Bansko, Bulgaria, 2 – 15 September 2015

The deadline for applications is 8 May 2015.
Further details are available here:
http://physicschool.web.cern.ch/PhysicSchool/ESHEP/ESHEP2015/

Visitors
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M. Hindmarsh 19.4. – 14.6. (KR)
D. Sokolowska 27.4. – 30.4. (VK)

HIP NEWS April 20th 2015
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COSMO-Seminar
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Wednesday 22 April at 14:15 in A315
Jorma Louko (University of Nottingham)
Did the chicken survive the firewall?

The forty-year debate about the final state of an evaporating black hole was recently reinvigorated by the suggestion that if unitarity is preserved, the black hole horizon develops a “firewall” which a) affects strongly any matter that crosses it and b) erases any information that such matter may carry about the outside world. We present evidence that neither a) nor b) is true for a firewall within flat spacetime quantum field theory, arguing that the same holds for sufficiently young gravitational firewalls. A firewall’s prospective capability to resolve the information loss paradox must hinge on its detailed gravitational structure, presently poorly understood.

The 2015 CERN-JINR European School of High-Energy Physics
————————————————————————————–
The 2015 European School of High-Energy Physics will take place in
Bansko, Bulgaria, 2 – 15 September 2015

The deadline for applications is 8 May 2015.
Further details are available here:
http://physicschool.web.cern.ch/PhysicSchool/ESHEP/ESHEP2015/

Staff training: Completing your tax return form (April 28th)
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Sign up in http://www.helsinki.fi/trainingcalendar (Staff Training Calendar HENKKA)
Registration is required latest Wednesday April 22nd 2015.

HENKKA: Tietoturvakoulutus
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Ilmoittautuminen http://www.helsinki.fi/trainingcalendar (HENKKA Koulutuskalenteri) 23.04.2015 mennessä.

Visitors
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M. Hindmarsh 19.4. – 14.6. (KR)
J. Louko 20.4. – 24.4. (KK)
D. Weir 20.4. – 24.4. (KR)

HIP NEWS April 13th 2015
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COSMO-Seminar
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Wednesday 15 April at 14:15 in A315
Sofie Marie Koksbang (University of Aarhus)
On the precision of ray tracing approximations — direct comparisons based on Szekeres models

In standard cosmology, model predictions of observables are based on Newtonian and perturbative approximations. But how precise are the standard approximation schemes? This question is typically sought answered through perturbation theory, but an alternative is to make direct comparisons of the approximation schemes with exact computations. I will introduce the family of exact, inhomogenous solutions to the Einstein field equations known as the quasi-spherical Szekeres models. After discussing some of the main results obtained with these models, I will introduce standard ray tracing techniques and discuss how the precision of these can be studied by using mock N-body data based on Szekeres models.

DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS / HIP JOINT COLLOQUIA / SEMINARS
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Thursday 16 April 2015 at 10.15 in A315
Giacomo Cacciapaglia (Lyon, IPN)
Unveiling the dynamics behind a composite Higgs

Abstract: I will present a novel approach to composite Higgs model building, based on a simple fundamental dynamics. It allows to describe in a unified way the Higgs as a pNGB and as a Technicolor-like bound state. The status after the LHC Run I will be discussed, together with the interplay with Lattice calculations and possible avenues for model building.

COSMO-Seminar
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Thursday 16 April at 10:15 in E205
Oleg Novikov (Saint Petersburg State University)
Influence of gravity and defect on a thick brane formation

The model of scalar matter minimally coupled to gravity that permits the formation of a domain wall (thick brane) triggered by a defect in the form of a thin brane is studied. The potential of the scalar matter is assumed to have O(N) symmetry softly broken by terms quadratic in fields. The background solutions are obtained and the corrections due to the gravity and defect are calculated. The mixing of gravitational and scalar degrees of freedom leads to the contributions to the fluctuation potential that remain nontrivial in the weak gravity limit. Their influence on the spectrum of light localized scalar states is investigated for various values of the defect tension. The talk will be mostly based on arXiv:1306.0723

The 2015 CERN-JINR European School of High-Energy Physics
————————————————————————————–
The 2015 European School of High-Energy Physics will take place in
Bansko, Bulgaria, 2 – 15 September 2015

The deadline for applications is 8 May 2015.
Further details are available here:
http://physicschool.web.cern.ch/PhysicSchool/ESHEP/ESHEP2015/

Staff training: Completing your tax return form (April 28th)
———————————————————————————–
Sign up in http://www.helsinki.fi/trainingcalendar (Staff Training Calendar HENKKA)
Registration is required latest Wednesday April 22nd 2015.

HENKKA: Tietoturvakoulutus
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Ilmoittautuminen http://www.helsinki.fi/trainingcalendar (HENKKA Koulutuskalenteri) 23.04.2015 mennessä.

Visitors
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G. Cacciapaglia 15.4. – 18.4. (KT,AV)
M. Hindmarsh 19.4. – 14.6. (KR)
S.M. Koksbang 14.4. – 15.4. (KE,SN)
J. Louko 17.4. – 26.4. (KK)
S. Stricker 9.4. – 13.4. (AV)

HIP NEWS March 30th 2015
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HIP Staff News
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Professor Peter Dendooven (Groningen) has been appointed Professor (FiDiPro) at HIP for the period 1.3.2015 – 28.2.2019. He will be working on the Tekes funded project NINS3.

DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS / HIP JOINT COLLOQUIA / SEMINARS
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Tuesday 7 April 2015 at 10.15 in A315
A. Rebhan (Wien)
Top-down holographic glueballs and their decay patterns

Abstract: I report recent results on the spectrum and the decay patterns of scalar and tensor glueballs in the top-down holographic Witten-Sakai Sugimoto model. This model, which has only one free dimensionless parameter, gives semi-quantitative predictions for the vector meson spectrum, their decay widths, and also a gluon condensate in agreement with SVZ sum rules. The predictions for glueball decay are compared with experimental data for some of the widely discussed gluon candidates in the meson spectrum.

The 2015 CERN-JINR European School of High-Energy Physics
————————————————————————————–
The 2015 European School of High-Energy Physics will take place in
Bansko, Bulgaria, 2 – 15 September 2015

The deadline for applications is 8 May 2015.
Further details are available here:
http://physicschool.web.cern.ch/PhysicSchool/ESHEP/ESHEP2015/

Finnish working culture
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The course is targeted for all new international employees of the Helsinki University
Sign up in http://www.helsinki.fi/trainingcalendar ( Staff Training Calendar HENKKA)

Visitors
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V. Keränen 30.3. – 10.4. (EK-V)
A. Rebhan 6.4. – 9.4. (AV)
S. Stricker 9.4. – 13.4. (AV)

HIP NEWS March 23rd 2015
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DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS / HIP JOINT COLLOQUIA / SEMINARS
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Thursday 26 March 2015 at 10.15 in A315
Laszlo Jenkovszky (Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics, National Ac. Sc. of Ukraine)
Regge factorization and diffraction dissociation at the LHC

Abstract: At the LHC, for the first time the nearly forward elastic scattering amplitude is completely determined by vacuum (Pomeron) exchange in the t-channel, making possible the full use of Regge factorization. Based on a simple Regge (Pomeron) pole exchange, different diffractive processes, including single, double proton dissociation as well as central production are related and compared with the existing LHC measurements.

COSMO-Seminar
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Wednesday 25 March 2015 at 14:15 in A315
Tomo Takahashi (University of Saga, Japan)
TBA

Visitors
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L. Jenkovsky 25.3. – 27.3. (RO)
T. Takahashi 23.3. – 27.3. (KE,SN)

HIP NEWS March 16th 2015
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DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS / HIP JOINT COLLOQUIA / SEMINARS
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Friday 20 March 2015 at 10.15 in A315
Miklos Långvik (Marseille)
Applications of conformal SU(2,2) transformations to spinfoams and spin-networks

Abstract: We construct the the cotangent bundle of SU(2,2) as a symplectic manifold and study different applications of it to spinfoam models and spin-networks. Most notably, the concept of a particle in a Poincaré invariant spacetime is discussed. Additionally, the geometrical interpretation of the full SU(2,2) phase-space in a possible spinfoam context is clarified. The talk will include a brief introduction to spinfoam models and especially a short review of how to include fermions into spinfoams.

Finnish working culture
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The course is targeted for all new international employees of the Helsinki University
Sign up in http://www.helsinki.fi/trainingcalendar ( Staff Training Calendar HENKKA)

Visitors
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T. Takahashi 21.3. – 28.3. (KE,SN)

HIP NEWS March 9th 2015
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DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS / HIP JOINT COLLOQUIA / SEMINARS
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Tuesday 10 March 2015 at 10.15 in A315
Olli Taanila (Nikhef)
Analytical models of holographic thermalization

Abstract: AdS/CFT is one of the very few tools we have to study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of strongly coupled systems. I present several different analytical models of gravitational collapse which are dual to the thermalization of a strongly coupled field theory. The time evolution of several different observables are computed in these backgrounds, such as two point functions and entaglement entropy.

Now open for applications: travel grants for doctoral students
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Further information please check Flamma https://flamma.helsinki.fi/portal/home/sisalto?_nfpb=true&_windowLabel=contentviewer&contentId=HY335107&lang=en&_pageLabel=content_view

HIP NEWS March 2nd 2015
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DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS / HIP JOINT COLLOQUIA / SEMINARS
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Wednesday 4 March 2015 at 16.00 (note time!) in A315
Matti Kalliokoski (CERN)
Beam Loss Monitoring and Machine Protection of the LHC for Run 2

Abstract: During Long Shutdown 1 (LS1) a series of modifications and updates to the LHC was made. These were done to allow the accelerator to reach 7 TeV and to improve the machine safety. One main part of the machine protection of the LHC is the Beam Loss Monitoring system (BLM). It consists of about 4000 monitors that have the task to prevent the superconducting magnets from quenching and protect the machine components from damage, as a result of critical beam losses. In this talk, modifications to the LHC Beam Instrumentation during the LS1, especially to the BLM system, are discussed.

COSMO-Seminar
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Wednesday 4 March at 14:15 in A315
David Alonso (University of Oxford)
The challenges of HI Intensity Mapping

Abstract: In the last years a novel observational technique in radio astronomy, labelled “Intensity mapping”, has gained relevance as a potentially very efficient cosmological tool due to its ability to map the density field on large scales over huge volumes. In this talk I will briefly review the current status of intensity mapping both regarding current observations and forecasts for future experiments. In particular I will focus on some of the practical challenges that intensity mapping must tackle before it can become a competitive observational technique.

Now open for applications: travel grants for doctoral students
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Further information please check Flamma https://flamma.helsinki.fi/portal/home/sisalto?_nfpb=true&_windowLabel=contentviewer&contentId=HY335107&lang=en&_pageLabel=content_view

Visitors
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D. Alonso 1.3. – 5.3. (KE,SN)

HIP NEWS February 23rd 2015
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Now open for applications: travel grants for doctoral students
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Further information please check Flamma https://flamma.helsinki.fi/portal/home/sisalto?_nfpb=true&_windowLabel=contentviewer&contentId=HY335107&lang=en&_pageLabel=content_view

Crowdfunding for researchers and projects
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Further information please check Flamma https://flamma.helsinki.fi/portal/home/fh?_nfpb=true&_windowLabel=content&contentId=HY335266&lang=en&_pageLabel=view

Occupational health nurse at Kumpula campus
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Please check https://flamma.helsinki.fi/portal/home/fh?_nfpb=true&_windowLabel=content&contentId=HY334797&lang=en&_pageLabel=view

Visitors
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T. Koivisto 23.2. – 27.2. (KE)

HIP NEWS February 9th 2015
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HIP Staff News
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Former HIP Director Dan-Olof Riska has been elected Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Cyprus Institute (www.cyi.ac.cy). The Cyprus Institute is a research oriented university in Nicosia.

DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS / HIP JOINT COLLOQUIA / SEMINARS
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Tuesday 10 February 2015 at 10.15 in A315
K. Kajantie (Helsinki)
Phases and phase transitions of hot QCD with lots of massless quarks

Abstract: For this talk QCD has Nc=3 colors and we want to study what happens when the number of quarks, assumed to be massless, grows, Nf=0,3,6,… We pretend that these numbers are so big that we can use holography, solve the equation of state from a 5-dimensional gravity model. The chirally symmetric quark-gluon plasma phase then is straightforward: temperature and entropy are those of a classical gravity black hole solution. However, at low T there are hadrons, but there is no classical solution giving their hadron gas thermodynamics – there is a T=0 solution from which masses of low-lying states can be computed. So we approach the problem phenomenologically and put in an ansatz for the hadron spectrum. Because of chiral symmetry breaking there at low T are at least Nf^2 massless Goldstone bosons, further there is a partly calculable Hagedorn spectrum of massive states. We try to see how the properties of the chiral phase transition constrain the hadron gas model and show explicitly how the equation of state looks like for a third order phase transition. These phenomenological constructions can be interpreted as 1-loop or even stringy corrections to the classical gravity dual. The final word on phase transition properties lies with lattice Monte Carlo, but imposing zero quark masses is very difficult on the lattice.

COSMO-Seminar
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Thursday 12 February at 10:15 in E205
Jun’ichi Yokoyama (University of Tokyo)
Magnetogenesis and Schwinger effects in inflationary universe

Abstract: It has been claimed that cosmological magnetic field is ubiquitous even in void regions. Such a maganetic field may have been generated during inflation in the early Universe by breaking the conformal invariance of the gauge field. But in order to avoid the strong coupling problem, one may end up with a larger electric field than the magnetic field. This motivates us to study the Schwinger effect during inflation or in de Sitter space. Making use of a simple model we calculate how Schwinger effect may operate in de Sitter background and discuss its possible implication to inflationary magnetogenesis.

Thursday 12 February at 14:15 in A311
Francesco Montanari (University of Geneva)
Relativistic galaxy number counts: spectrum and bispectrum

Abstract: The fully relativistic expression for galaxy number counts is considered up to second order in perturbation theory. We propose to determine the truly observed galaxy spectrum and bispectrum as function of angles and redshifts. We show that neglecting integrated relativistic terms may bring significant bias on cosmological parameter constraints for future large-scale and deep-redshift galaxy surveys.

New tax cards valid as of 1 February 2015
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Old employees: No need to submit your tax card to the employer if your tax information has not changed.
New employees: Submit your tax card to the employer
Please check Flamma https://flamma.helsinki.fi/en/notifications/new-tax-cards-valid-as-of-1-february-2015

Visitors
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F. Montanari 9.2. – 13.2. (KE,SN)
J. Yokoyama 10.2. – 13.2. (KE,SN)