ARC Seminars have been permanently moved to: https://arc-seminars.github.io/arc/
The ARC seminar is a seminar at Caltech where graduate students give pedagogical presentations about research-level topics to their peers (in the broad areas of ARC: astrophysics, relativity, cosmology, very broadly construed). It is totally run by and for students.
Its main goals are to
- provide friendly introductions to otherwise opaque research topics.
- serve as a friendly setting for practicing research talks.
- create resources which can be used to train future students.
Speaker-chosen snacks are provided at every ARC seminar, and all graduate students (and motivated undergraduates) are welcome to attend! Please join our mailing list here to learn about when future seminars are happening and how to sign up to give one!
The ARC seminar is currently organized by:
- Taylor Knapp: second-year graduate student working on numerical relativity in the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) group
- Elijah Kane: fourth-year graduate student in the Observational Cosmology group working on cosmological instrumentation
- Nicholas Rui: fifth-year graduate student Jim Fuller’s group working on stellar physics and asteroseismology
In Winter & Spring 2025, the ARC seminar takes place weekly on Fridays, 1-2pm in 312 Cahill.
Upcoming presentations
| Date | Title | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 16 May 2025 | The Triaxial Cow: Measuring the 3D Shapes of Galaxy Clusters | Adriana Gavidia |
| 23 May 2025 | Unruh Effect: The Thermal Glow of Acceleration abstract | Guido Da Re |
| 30 May 2025 | How did we survive PhD? (contributed recollections and advices from G5s) | Yoonsoo Kim |
Past presentations
| Date | Title | Speaker | Resources |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9 May 2025 | Tasting the Gravitational Rainbow: the Future of Gravitational Waves abstract | Andrew Laeuger | recording slides |
| 18 April 2025 | The anti-aligned spin of GW191109: Glitch Mitigation and its Implications abstract | Rhiannon Udall | recording |
| 11 April 2025 | Derivation of Kerr Metric (WITHOUT quotation marks): Newman-Janis Algorithm Demystified abstract | Joonhwi Kim | |
| 4 April 2025 | White dwarfs are hot and cool! abstract | Nicholas Rui | recording slides |
| 14 March 2025 | Probing Cosmic Inflation with BICEP Array abstract | Aaron Steiger | recording slides |
| 7 March 2025 | Ring-ring: black hole calling! abstract | Isabella Pretto | recording slides |
| 28 February 2025 | Time Travelling Particles: Fact or Fake News? abstract | Annika Dugad | |
| 21 February 2025 | The Stochastic GW Background: What it is and current research abstract | Taylor Knapp | recording slides |
| 14 February 2025 | WD + MS binaries as probes of binary interaction abstract | Natsuko Yamaguchi | slides |
| 7 February 2025 | Infrared emission lines in the dusty interstellar medium abstract | Elijah Kane | recording slides |
| 31 January 2025 | Introduction of GRMHD simulations abstract | Jiaxi Wu | recording slides |
| 10 June 2024 | Introduction to Post-Newtonian abstract | Dongze Sun | recording slides |
| 20 May 2024 | What’s so Extreme About Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals? abstract | Talya Klinger | slides |
| 15 April 2024 | Angular momentum transport in stars abstract | Nicholas Rui | recording notes |
| 4 March 2024 | Methods of setting dark matter relic abundance abstract | Isabel Sands | |
| 20 February 2024 | The X-ray Main Sequence abstract | Tony Rodríguez | recording |
| 6 February 2024 | Possible Spacetime Discretization in Astrophysical Phenomena abstract | Vittoria Tommasini | |
| 23 January 2024 | Escaping the Uncertainty Principle: The Hilbert–Huang Transform abstract | Isabella Pretto | recording slides |
| 27 November 2023 | Simulating Astrophysical Plasmas in the Lab | Quinn Morgan | recording slides |
| 20 November 2023 | MHD Dynamo | Yoonsoo Kim | recording slides |
| 30 October 2023 | Understanding Highly Sensitive KIDs | Elijah Kane | recording |
| 16 October 2023 | Modeling the Two Body Gravitational Waveform with Effective One Body Model | Brian Seymour | recording |
| 18 September 2023 | Communicating Science | Nicholas Rui | slides |
| 1 September 2023 | MCMCs Part I: Basic Principles | Rhiannon Udall | recording |
| 30 May 2023 | Creating Interacting Supernovae | Samantha Wu | recording slides |
| 2 May 2023 | Atom Interferometers | Yufeng Du | |
| 3 April 2023 | Dimensionality Reduction | Nicholas Rui | recording notes |
| 6 March 2023 | Spin-space-time: Unification of Spin and Spacetime into a Complex Geometry | Joonhwi Kim | |
| 6 February 2023 | A Sketch of the LIGO Detectors | Rhiannon Udall | recording slides notes |
| 23 January 2023 | Git for Your Grandma and Other Parties | Sarah Habib | slides |
| 7 November 2022 | Problems with ΛCDM Cosmology on Small Scales (and How to Fix Them) | Isabel Sands | |
| 24 October 2022 | What Gravitational Waves Actually Look Like | Keefe Mitman | recording slides Mathematica notebook |
| 10 October 2022 | Dynamical Tides in Stars | Linhao Ma | recording notes |
| 26 September 2022 | Ingredients for a BBH Simulation | Kyle Nelli | recording slides |
| 19 September 2022 | Types are Good, Actually | Kiran Shila | recording |
| 29 August 2022 | Gaia Data Release 3 | Nicholas Rui | recording notes slides |
| 22 August 2022 | Causality and Locality | Isaac Legred | recording notes |
| 1 August 2022 | Mass Transfer Stability in Binaries | Peter Scherbak | recording slides |
| 11 July 2022 | Shakura–Sunyaev Disk | Yoonsoo Kim | recording slides |
| 23 June 2022 | Chemistry of Planet Formation | Suchitra Narayanan | recording |
| 16 June 2022 | Fast Radio Bursts | Nadine Soliman | recording slides |
| 16 May 2022 | Physics-Informed Machine Learning | Himanshu Chaudhary | recording slides |
| 9 May 2022 | Zero to Julia with AD | Kiran Shila | recording slides |
| 18 April 2022 | Introduction to Asteroseismology | Nicholas Rui | recording notes |
| 4 April 2022 | Shock-Capturing Schemes for Discontinuous Galerkin Method in SpECTRE | Yoonsoo Kim | |
| 7 March 2022 | Beyond General Relativity | Kyle Nelli | recording notes |
| 7 February 2022 | An Invitation to Complex Spacetime I: Newman–Janis from Amplitudes | Joonhwi Kim | recording |
| 24 January 2022 | Dynamic Programming | Sarah Habib | |
| 10 January 2022 | Rapid Stellar Rotation and Exoplanet Spin-Orbit Measurement | Shashank Dholakia Shishir Dholakia | recording Jupyter notebooks |
| 6 December 2021 | Bayesian Inference with Nested Sampling | Rhiannon Udall | notes animation |
| 15 November 2021 | Rotating Stars in General Relativity | Yoonsoo Kim | notes |
| 1 November 2021 | Diffeomorphism Invariance | Isaac Legred | |
| 18 October 2021 | Stellar Encounters and Dynamical Friction | Nicholas Rui | notes |
Nicholas Rui 
