Inicio: 12:00h
Ponente: Eric Galbraith (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB))
Lugar: Alberto Lobo Room

Humanity has been causing environmental problems forever, and has often resolved them with great success. But in the past, these were problems faced by local populations, which were able to coordinate their activities in order to resolve them locally. Climate change is fundamentally different, in that it is a collective problem played out in the well-mixed global atmosphere, and which can only be addressed through globally-coordinated policy that addresses the majority of our species. Thus far, we have made essentially no tangible progress on this challenge. I will briefly discuss the scientific basis of climate change, including how greenhouse gases work, evidence for natural climate change in the past, and human emissions. I will then review expected impacts of climate change on a range of timescales, focusing on temperatures, food production, sea level rise and ecosystem alterations, as well as the reasons why the impacts will almost certainly exceed expectations. I will then discuss the possible means by which climate change can be mitigated or reversed, and how these might interact with other aspects of human activities and well-being. I will conclude that, although a daunting challenge, the climate emergency may provide the impetus required to develop global policy that could benefit humanity in the long-term.

Inicio: 12:15h
Ponente: Carlos Sopuerta (ICE)
Lugar: Alberto Lobo Conference Room

After the inauguration of Gravitational Wave Astronomy with
the first direct detection of Gravitational Waves from a binary black
hole coalescence by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave
Observatory (LIGO), the race to cover the most relevant parts of the
Gravitational-wave spectrum is currently at full speed.  Indeed, after
eleven detections  (10 Binary Black Holes and 1 Binary Neutron Star),
the LIGO-Virgo collaboration, operating in the high-frequency band, is
immersed in the third observation run with a lot of new potential
candidates. On the other hand, LISA is the future ESA-L3 mission for
low-frequency gravitational-wave astronomy. Pulsar Timing Arrays,
covering the very-low frequency band, have sensitivities within the
discovery region of the predicted parameter space. And finally, CMB
polarization experiments continue their developments for the ultra-low
frequency band.

Despite these efforts there are still gaps to fill in the gravitational
wave spectrum.  In particular, the deciHertz band is not well covered
neither by the ground-based detectors nor by LISA. In this talk I will
present new efforts to fill the deciHertz band with a new technology,
atom interferometry, and I will talk about the great science that can be
done with the proposed detector ELGAR.

Reference: http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.03701