The Oskar Klein Centre blog

Cosmology and a bit more

New Steering Group and postdocs at the Oskar Klein Centre

This week, two major things have happened of importance for the future working of the Oskar Klein Centre. First, a new Steering Group of the Centre has been appointed by the Rektor of Stockholm University, Professor Kåre Bremer. The new Steering Group has 3 new members and consists of:

Lars Bergström (chair), Department of Physics, Stockholm University (SU)
Claes Fransson (vice chair), Department of Astronomy, SU
Christophe Clément (new member), Department of Physics, SU
Jan Conrad (new member), Department of Physics, SU
Ariel Goobar, Department of Physics, SU
Sten Hellman, Department of Physics, SU
Klas Hultqvist, Department of Physics, SU
Garrelt Mellema (new member), Department of Astronomy, SU
Mark Pearce, Department of Physics, Royal Institute of Technology
Göran Östlin, Department of Astronomy, SU

(In addition we have adjoined Christopher Savage as a representative of the OKC postdocs, and Serena Nobili, who  among many other things at the Centre also acts as secretary of the meetings of the Steering Group.)
Read more…

End of a good Oskar Klein Centre year

This year has been very interesting for the OKC. The highlight was of course the Nobel Prize for Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess.

The Nobel banquet, waiting for the Laureates and Royalties to arrive. (Photo: Lars Bergström)

The half-day December 12th immediately following the Prize ceremony, organized by Ariel Goobar and Jesper Sollerman, was a great success. I could not be present, unfortunately, but I can recommend the video from the very memorable colloquium session, at http://videos.albanova.se/colloquia/2011/ – it is well worth watching, as is the colloquium the day after on global warming by Rich Muller (who was one of the forefathers of the Supernova Cosmology Project). Read more…

The Klein Bottle activity

We had a new activity, last Wednesday, when a science pub (by some of course immediately named the “Klein bottle”) was held for the first time at OKC. This is a combined scientific and social activity meant to take place monthly, on the last week of the month, and with the working groups of OKC taking turns arranging. Read more…

New activity starting at OKC: The Monthly Science Pub!

A new academic year has started, and it is time also for the Oskar Klein Centre to get up to full steam again. As the OKC is to some extent a rather large, loosely connected set of people and groups, we feel in the Steering Group that there is a need to better understand what everybody is doing, and to encourage collaboration. To achieve this, under relaxed conditions, we will let the various Working Groups of OKC take turns in arranging an afternoon (at the end of each month) where a very basic introduction to the main activities of the group will be given, followed by discussions and ending with a pub. This will be both useful and enjoyable events!

The OKC Day

This spring’s Oskar Klein Centre day took place in beautiful surroundings yesterday (Monday, May 30th), at Villa Källhagen – a nice conference centre in Djurgården near the water. As is now customary in these general OKC meetings, first a summary of the activities of the working groups was done, with slide presentations by Jonas Enander (Dark Energy), Christoph Clement (Dark Matter), Elena Moretti and Josefin Larsson (Extreme Objects) and Rachel Rosen (Fundamental Theory). Although the working group for Structure formation was left without slides due to a late cancellation, Lucia Gaita and Kanan Datta made a very good, unprepared presentation of their activities.

After this very good summary of achievements during the last semester, it was time for a new activity  - brainstorming – on the initiative of OKC’s Communication Manager, Serena Nobili. We had two topics to discuss very freely about Read more…

PONT Workshop in Avignon

Last week I was in Avignon, France, giving a talk at the PONT Workshop there. Among the people there was Sean Carroll, who some of  you may remember (he visited us some 6 or 7 years ago). He  runs an interesting physics blog since many years. You can find his report from the workshop here.

-Lars

Avignon, France (the real "pont du Avignon", of the children's song)

Collaboration between OKC and Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies

Last week, Jan Conrad and I spent a couple of days in Dublin, Ireland, invited by Felix Aharonian and his colleagues at DIAS. We had interesting dicussions around many topics, the most interesting being the possibility to obtain a lower energy threshold for gamma-rays at imaging air Cherenkov telescopes, for instance by using large mirrors at high altitude. This would be of importance for the dark matter search (that we are experts on at OKC) and for GRBs and AGNs (where Dublin has very good expertise and we also have activity in OKC). We decided that this topic would be interesting enough for both parties that we should try to arrange a small workshop together to investigate the scientific aspects of such a detector. Read more…

News from the Venice Neutrino Workshop

Here is just a very brief summary of results that have been presented so far. (For an extensive blog coverage about the event, see this link.)
Unfortunately, Elena Aprile did not present the new results from Xenon100, but she said that they will be presented at a press conference in Gran Sasso in April. It seems that they have new accurate measurements of the efficiency L_eff over a substantial energy range, that of course will be crucial when interpreting the data.
In neutrino physics, the present buzz concerns the possibility of sterile neutrinos, as seems to be mildly preferred by cosmological data. Read more…

Welcome to the Oskar Klein Centre blog

As a way to communicate more quickly and efficiently between ourselves in the Oskar Klein Centre (OKC) and with the outside world, we have with the advice of Serena Nobili, responsible for OKC information and outreach, started this blog. Here you will now and then get updates on what is happening in the Centre Read more…