"Is there a connection between the damped oscillations of a black hole and its quantum structure?"

In this talk, I will review some of the ideas (Hod's conjecture and Maggiore's interpretation) in the literature that attempt to link the highly damped ringing (quasinormal) modes of black holes with the quantum structure of the black hole event horizon. I then use the example of a quantum corrected black hole to show that there is indeed a connection between these modes and the microscopic structure of black holes.

"Testing String Theory with Cosmological Observations?"

Rare Isotope physics: From atomic nuclei to exploding stars

Atomic nuclei are the core of matter and the fuel of stars. The dynamics of this many-body system made of protons and neutrons are governed by the strong force. Short lived nuclei, so-called rare isotopes or exotic nuclei, hold the key to our understanding of the workings of the strong force in nuclei and nuclear matter as well as of the origin of the heavy chemical elements that are created in explosions of massive stars. TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for nuclear and particle physics, operates one of the world's leading facilities for rare isotope beams, ISAC, and is currently constructing the new Advanced Rare IsotopE Laboratory (ARIEL). In this talk I will present how experiments with rare isotopes at TRIUMF are recreating in the laboratory the nuclear reactions inside supernova explosions and how these studies can reveal important aspects of workings of the strong force in nuclei and neutron stars.

Reiner Kruecken is Head of the Science Division at TRIUMF, Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics. He joined TRIUMF in February 2011 after 8 1/2 years at the Technical University Munich, Germany, where he holds the chair (C4) for Experimental Physics of Hadrons and Nuclei. Kruecken received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of Cologne in 1995. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory he moved to Yale University in 1997 where he was an Assistant Professor at the Physics Department and the A.W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory until he moved to Munich in 2002. His current research interests are in the area of the structure of exotic nuclei and nuclear matter, nuclear astrophysics, as well as applications of nuclear physics methods to radiation biology and medicine.

He is currently a member of the Scientific Council of GANIL, France, the SNOlab Experimental Advisory Committee and the JINA International Advisory Committee. From 2007 until 2010 he served as the chair of the 'Hadrons and Nuclei' chapter of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG), and was its deputy chair in 2010 and 2011. From 2003 to 2009 Kruecken was a member of the German Advisory Committee for Hadrons and Nuclei (KHuK) and was its deputy chair from 2003 to 2006. From 2006 to 2010 he was a research area coordinator and research board member of the DFG Cluster of Excellence "Origin and Structure of the Universe" in Munich. He served as the science representative of the German delegation of the Nuclear Physics Working Group of the OECD Global Science Forum from 2006 to 2008 and has been a member of various international review and advisory committees. He is a member of the editorial boards of Progress in Nuclear and Particle Physics as well as European Physical Journal A.