Abstract: MICROLAS is a laser-ablation based micro-thruster concept under investigation at the German Aerospace Center in Stuttgart, Germany. The concept involves a solid propellant and no moving parts. The goal is to create a low noise thruster as, e.g., needed for space-borne gravitational wave observatories. The talk will involve simulations as well as experiments on the thrust and thrust noise to be expected from a MICROLAS thruster. A special emphasis will be put on the different ablation mechanisms and their influence on the propellant in the context of thrust noise stability.

Speaker: Dr. Raoul-Amadeus Lorbeer received his doctors degree from the Leibniz University Hanover in 2012. During his thesis and the two succeeding years he became a specialist for tomographic imaging and laser based microscopy. In 2015 he joined the Studies & Concepts group of the Institute of Technical Physics in the German Aerospace Center. Since then he performs research in the field of laser ablative thrust generation.

Abstract: The top quark is the most massive elementary particle ever discovered. The structure of quark masses and the fantastically large top quark mass, which makes the top quark coupling to the Higgs field suspiciously close to unity, require a more fundamental explanation. Whatever the account, it beholds the top quark as a special particle in understanding of the particle universe. The top quark mass provides a consistency check of the Standard Model, and in relation with the Higgs boson mass, controls the stability of the universe as a quantum system. In this talk, I review the recent measurements of the top quark mass made using data collected with the CMS detector at LHC. I close by briefly discussing the outlook for future measurements.

The spatial and velocity distributions of dark matter particles in the Milky Way Halo affect the signals expected to be observed in searches for dark matter. Results from direct detection experiments are often analyzed assuming a simple isothermal distribution of dark matter, the Standard Halo Model (SHM). Yet there has been skepticism regarding the validity of this simple model due to the complicated gravitational collapse and merger history of actual galaxies. In this paper we compare the SHM to the results of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation to investigate whether or not the SHM is a good representation of the true WIMP distribution in the analysis of direct detection data. We examine two Milky Way-like galaxies from the MaGICC cosmological simulations (a) with dark matter only and (b) with baryonic physics included. The inclusion of baryons drives the shape of the DM halo to become more spherical and makes the velocity distribution of dark matter particles less anisotropic especially at large heliocentric velocities, thereby making the SHM a better fit. We also note that we do not find a significant disk-like rotating dark matter component in either of the two galaxy halos with baryons that we examine, suggesting that dark disks are not a generic prediction of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. We conclude that in the Solar neighborhood, the SHM is in fact a good approximation to the true dark matter distribution in these cosmological simulations (with baryons) which are reasonable representations of the Milky Way, and hence can also be used for the purpose of dark matter direct detection calculations.