[Emeriti-faculty] Department of Physics and Astronomy Events for Week of October 19, 2009

[Gayle Grant <gayle grant tufts edu>]

Good morning:

Sorry for the delay in getting out the events for the week.

Events for the week of October 19, 2009

Monday, October 19, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Physics Graduate Students’ JOURNAL CLUB
Evan Pierce
“The Proper Time Axis:Variation on the Traditional Minkowski Space-Time 
Diagram”
Robinson Hall 250, 5:00 pm
(undergraduate students, faculty and anyone interested are also invited: 
food served at 4:30 pm in Knipp Library)


Tuesday, October 20, 2009
2:30pm
Tufts University
Joint Tufts/CFA/MIT Cosmology Seminar
Robinson 250
"Quantum stress tensor fluctuations and inflation"
Larry Ford
Tufts Institute of Cosmology
Refreshments served at 2:00pm in Knipp Library, Room 251


Thursday, October 22, 2009
1:30 PM, Robinson Hall, Room 250
Tufts University
Lunchtime Cosmology Seminar
“Boom and Bust Inflation: A Graceful Exit Via Compact Extra Dimensions “
Adam Brown
Princeton University
Abstract:
A model of inflation is proposed in which compact extra dimensions allow 
a graceful exit without recourse to flat potentials or super-Planckian 
field values. Though bubbles of true vacuum are too sparse to uniformly 
reheat the Universe by colliding with each other, a compact dimension 
enables a single bubble to uniformly reheat by colliding with itself. 
This mechanism, which generates an approximately scale invariant 
perturbation spectrum, requires that the extra dimension be somewhat 
larger than the false vacuum Hubble length.