11th Birmingham-Nottingham Extragalactic Workshop - 1st Announcement

            "Semi-analytic models - are we kidding ourselves?"

                        June 24-25, 2008


These Workshops are informal 2-day events, involving typically ~50
participants, held each summer, with the aim of bringing together
observation and theory in a topical and well-focussed area of
extragalactic astronomy.

This year's topic is semi-analytic models of structure formation. Such
models start from a developing population of dark matter halos, often
taken from N-body simulations. The behaviour of the baryonic matter is
then grafted on, using analytical approximations to capture the essential
physics of cooling, heating, star formation and evolution, galaxy
dynamics, growth of black holes, and other processes of interest. These
physical prescriptions contain a number of adjustable parameters, which
can be tuned to attain a reasonable match to selected observational
properties, such as galaxy luminosity functions and the X-ray luminosities
of clusters.

This semi-analytic approach allows baryon physics to be incoporated in a
way which, compared to hydrodynamical simulations, is fast, transparent
and easily modified, and arguably provides greater physical insight into
the results. The contrary view is that semi-analytic models contain so
many adjustable features that their optimisation constitutes little more
than an underdetermined fitting operation, resulting in models which are
non-unique and have little predictive power.

In this Workshop we aim to examine different semi-analytic prescriptions,
to discuss the extent to which these are able to reproduce observational
properties for which they have not been tuned, and to see where they fail
and what can be learned from this.

The Workshop will be held in the School of Physics & Astronomy at
Birmingham University. The format will be similar to previous workshops in
the series, with a mixture of 15 and 30 minute talks, leaving plenty of
time for discussion. A web site for the meeting is currently under
construction at http://www.sr.bham.ac.uk/workshop/2008/.

Likely speakers at this early stage include: Richard Bower, Malcolm
Bremer, Romeel Dave, Andy Fabian, Sadegh Kochfar, Ian McCarthy, Frazer
Pearce and Joe Silk.

The meeting will start at 11:00am on Tuesday June 24th and conclude at
around 4:00pm on the 25th, so that only one overnight stay in Birmingham
should be required. Please let us know if you would like to attend. If you
are interested in giving a talk on the theme of the workshop, let us have
a title (see form below) and brief description.

The basic workshop fee will be 55 pounds per participant. This will cover 
two lunches, plus a meal at a local restaurant on the Tuesday evening. A 
list of local hotels and guest houses will be available soon from the
conference website.

Unfortunately we have no funds to pay for travel or accommodation.
However, we have kept the registration fee to the minimum required to
cover costs, and the inclusion of meals in this price is intended to make
your relations with your finance office as easy as possible.

Please reply (to workshop@star.sr.bham.ac.uk) by MAY 28th, when the
programme of talks will be selected. Please pass this message on to anyone
else within your department who you think may be interested.

We look forward to seeing you at the workshop.


                          Trevor Ponman


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Please cut/paste and mail this form to workshop@star.sr.bham.ac.uk
by May 28th, 2008.

        11th Birmingham-Nottingham Extragalactic Workshop
        "Semi-analytic models - are we kidding ourselves?"
                    June 24-25, 2008

Name:-

Institute:-


(Delete below as applicable)

(a) I would like to attend the Workshop but not make a presentation.

(b) I would like to present a poster entitled:-

(c) I would like to give a talk entitled:-

    Brief description of talk:-

    Preferred duration [15 min/30 min]:-

N.B. Talks should be closely related to the theme of the workshop.


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