Session S10: Invited Session: Instrumentation, Flavor Physics and Apker Award

Instrumenting LSST: Three Billion Pixels on the Sky

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will conduct a 10-year all-sky optical survey with science goals ranging from the study of the nature of dark energy and dark matter to exploring the transient sky. As a dedicated survey telescope LSST has a single instrument, the LSST Camera. Now under construction, the LSST Camera will be the largest astronomical camera ever built, with a 3.2 gigapixel CCD focal plane, covering a 9.6 square degree field of view, and having a readout speed of only 2 seconds per image. In this talk, I will describe how the camera's design meets the ambitious scientific goals of LSST with an emphasis on some of its novel instrumental features.   

Leroy Apker Award Talk: Finite Temperature Casimir Effect for Charged Scalars in a Magnetic Field

We examine the finite temperature Casimir effect for charged scalar fields (both massive and massless) confined between very large, perfectly conducting parallel plates using the zeta function regularization technique. The scalar field satisfies Dirichlet boundary conditions at the plates and a magnetic field perpendicular to the plates is present. We obtain equivalent expressions for the zeta function which are exact to all orders in the magnetic field strength, temperature, scalar field mass and plate distance. We then use the zeta function to calculate the Helmholtz free energy of the scalar field and the Casimir pressure on the plates in the separate cases of high temperature, small plate distance, strong magnetic field and large scalar mass. In all cases, simple analytic expressions of the zeta function, free energy and pressure are obtained, which are very accurate and valid for practically all values of temperature, plate distance, magnetic field and mass.