"Chasing supermassive black holes at the dawn of the Universe"
Lea Marcotulli (Clemson)
Accreting supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies are sometimes capable of powering extreme relativistic jets. When pointed close to our line of sight, these are called blazars. The jet’s peculiar orientation makes these monsters shine as bright as a hundred trillion Suns and enables us to find them at the dawn of time, when the universe was barely 1-2 billion years old. Finding more such sources and understanding their evolution is key to set robust constraints on the evolution of jets and supermassive black holes through cosmic time. In this talk, I will present our recent work on some of the most powerful and distant blazars ever detected, and I will highlight our most recent results on their cosmic evolution.
"From 100 Mpc to 1 Mpc with 1D Lyman-alpha Power Spectrum"
Naim Karacayli (Yale)
Through absorption lines in quasar spectra, the Lyα forest technique can probe matter in vast volumes far into the past (2 < z < 5) and at smaller scales than galaxy surveys (r < 1 Mpc). 1D power spectrum of the Lyα forest (P1D) has emerged as a competitive framework to study new physics, but also has come with various challenges and systematic errors in analysis. In this talk, I will go over the optimal quadratic estimator for P1D, the robustness tests against gaps and continuum errors, and share simple forecasts for the upcoming Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Finally, I will present the results from an application to the largest data set of high-resolution spectra (552 quasars). A crude Fisher analysis estimates that these results will improve warm dark matter mass constraints by 60%.