All talks and posters will be in the AT&T Conference Center. Lunch will be provided daily by the AT&T Center and is included in the registration fee. The conference reception will be held Monday evening at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and transportation to and from the Center will be provided. In addition, there will be a barbeque in downtown Austin on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday evening the conference dinner will be held at the Driskill Hotel (travel arrangements to be determined) and we are pleased to announce that Professor Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics, will be our dinner speaker. There is an additional $50.00 fee to attend this dinner, which is payable at the time of registration. Coffee and snacks will be provided during breaks.

Meeting format: Each morning and afternoon session will be dedicated to one of five challenges:

• Challenges I: The Primordial IMF


• Challenges II: The First Supernovae


• Challenges III: The Pop III - II Transition


• Challenges IV: Hunting for the First Galaxies


• Challenges V: Early Black Holes and the SMBH Assembly Process

Each challenge will be opened by one or more "review" talks to be followed by both "invited" and "contributed" talks. The lengths of the talks are

• review (R) 45 min: 35 min talk / 10 min discussion


• invited (I) 25 min: 20 min talk / 5 min discussion


• contributed (C) 15 min: 12 min talk / 3 min discussion

Poster information: There will be a dedicated hour each day from 1:30 - 2:30 pm for the viewing and discussion of posters. We strongly encourage presenters to be available for questions in front of their poster that hour if they are not attending a Working Group. Many very interesting new results will appear in these posters that would have been accepted as talks had there been more room in the program, so we invite all to view and discuss them.

Posters can be set up in the Center on Monday morning or later. There are no strict size or format guidelines for the posters; AAS or IAUS rules can be taken as good guidelines. They must be taken down by 2:30 p.m. on Thursday. Participants will be asked to provide a PDF or PS version of their poster as well as a one-page summary for inclusion in the conference proceedings.

Working Groups: To foster interaction between theorists and leading high-redshift observers, and to establish simulation roadmaps for the next few years, a working group will be organized each day for a specific challenge over the second half of the lunch hour. Prior to the conference, an email discussion will be organized among the speakers in a given challenge to solicit a list of the most important issues that should be investigated by upcoming numerical models (those not in an email list can be added to it by contacting Dan Whalen). The questions will be presented at the beginning of each working group, which will be presided over by two chairmen. These chairmen will then moderate the ensuing discussion, ensuring that all can give input in a discussion format that is more structured than a free-for-all but less rigid than a talk or panel.

Please click on talk titles to see an abstract!

Monday March 8

Time	Speaker	Title
8:00 - 8:45 am	Registration
8:45 - 9:00 am	Neal Evans, Volker Bromm, and Dean Mary-Ann Rankin	Welcoming Remarks
The Big Picture       (session chair: Paul Shapiro)
9:00 - 9:45 am	Avi Loeb	The End of the Cosmic Dark Ages (R)
9:45 - 10:30 am	John C. Mather	Capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope (R)
10:30 - 11:00 am	Coffee Break
11:00 - 11:45 am	Francoise Combes	ALMA and the First Galaxies (R)
Challenges I: The Primordial IMF       (session chair: Masayuki Umemura)
11:45 - 12:30 pm	Michael L. Norman	The Pop III IMF: A Progress Report (R)
12:30 - 2:00 pm	Lunch / Pop III IMF Working Group (chairs: Brian O'Shea, Jason Tumlinson) WG 1 slides
2:00 - 2:25 pm	Ralf Klessen	Possible Lessons from Present-Day Star Formation (I)
2:25 - 2:50 pm	Jonathan Tan	Protostellar Feedback Processes and the Mass of the First Stars (I)
2:50 - 3:05 pm	Matt Turk	Pop III Binary Formation (C)
3:05 - 3:30 pm	Katie Freese	Supermassive Dark Stars (I)
3:30 - 3:45 pm	Paul Clark	Disc Fragmentation around Primordial Stars (C)
3:45 - 4:15 pm	Coffee Break
4:15 - 4:40 pm	Masahiro Machida	Magnetohydrodynamics of Population III Star Formation (I)
4:40 - 5:05 pm	Tim Beers	Probing the IMF with Hamburg/ESO and SEGUE (I)
5:05 - 5:20 pm	Daniel Wolf Savin	Molecular Hydrogen Formation in the Early Universe: New Implications for Population III Stars from Laboratory Measurements (C)
5:20 - 5:35 pm	Fabio Iocco	Dark Matter and the First Stars (C)

 

7:00 - 9:00 pm	Welcoming Reception at TACC

 

Tuesday March 9

Time	Speaker	Title
8:00 - 8:45 am	Registration
Challenges II: Finding the First Cosmic Explosions       (session chair: Craig Wheeler)
8:45 - 9:30 am	Alexander Heger	The End of the First Stars (R)
9:30 - 9:55 am	Chris Fryer	The Light Curves and Spectra of the First Cosmic Explosions (I)
9:55 - 10:20 am	Ken Nomoto	Nucleosynthesis in Hypernovae and Faint SNe (I)
10:20 - 10:50 am	Coffee Break
10:50 - 11:15 am	Jason Tumlinson	Pop III, Pop II, and the Fossil Record (I)
11:15 - 11:40 am	Anna Frebel	Observations of the Chemical Abundances of Metal-Poor Stars and their Connection to the Pop III IMF (I)
11:40 - 12:05 pm	Shri Kulkarni	The Hunt for the Most Luminous Supernovae (I)
12:05 - 12:30 pm	Daniel Kasen	The First Explosive Transients in the Universe (I)
12:30 - 2:30 pm	Lunch / Primordial SNe Working Group (chairs: Chris Fryer, Massimo Stiavelli) WG 2 slides
2:30 - 3:00 pm	Edo Berger	High-Redshift Gamma-Ray Bursts (I)
Challenges III: The Pop III/II Transition       (session chair: Neal Evans)
3:00 - 3:45 pm	Raffaella Schneider	The Pop III - II Transition (R)
3:45 - 4:10 pm	Britton Smith	Three Modes of Metal-Enriched Star Formation in the Early Universe (I)
4:10 - 4:40 pm	Coffee Break
4:40 - 5:05 pm	Kazu Omukai	Low-Metallicity Star Formation: the Pop III-II Transition (I)
5:05 - 5:30 pm	Isabelle Cherchneff	Molecules and Dust in the Early Universe: the Supernova Connection (C)

 

7:00 - 9:00 pm	Texas Barbecue (Downtown Austin)

Wednesday March 10

Time	Speaker	Title
8:00 - 8:45 am	Registration
Challenges III: The Pop III/II Transition, continued       (session chair: Neal Evans)
8:45 - 9:10 am	Brian O'Shea	Local and Global Radiative Feedback in Pop III Star Formation (I)
9:10 - 9:25 am	Michele Trenti	Population III Star Formation during and after the Reionization Epoch (C)
9:25 - 9:40 am	Simon Glover	The Stellar Initial Mass Function in Low-Metallicity Gas (C)
9:40 - 9:55 am	Eli Dwek	The Origin of Dust in High-z Galaxies (C)
9:55 - 10:20 am	Tom Abel	Star Formation Then and Now (I)
Challenges IV: Hunting for the First Galaxies       (session chair: Francoise Combes)
10:20 - 10:50 am	Coffee Break
10:50 - 11:35 am	Andrea Ferrara	The Most Distant Galaxies: Theoretical Challenges (R)
11:35 - 12:20 pm	Massimo Stiavelli	Studying the First Galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope (R)
12:20 - 12:35 pm	Asantha Cooray	Hunting for Signatures of First Galaxies in the Infrared Background (C)
12:35 - 2:35 pm	Lunch / Pop III - II Transition Working Group (chairs: Anna Frebel, Masayuki Umemura) WG 3 slides
2:35 - 3:00 pm	Thomas Greif	Supernova Feedback and the First Galaxies (I)
3:00 - 3:15 pm	Stefania Salvdori	Probing Early Cosmic Star Formation with the Faintest Dwarf Galaxies (I)
3:15 - 3:40 pm	Mark Dijkstra	The Lyman-Alpha Signatures of the First Galaxies (I)
3:40 - 3:55 pm	Katie Freese	Recent Progress on Dark Matter Searches (I)
3:55 - 4:20 pm	Coffee Break
4:20 - 5:05 pm	Richard Ellis	Did Star-Forming Galaxies Reionize the Universe? (R)
5:05 - 5:30 pm	Jarrett Johnson	The Observational Signatures of the First Galaxies (I)
5:30 - 5:55 pm	Elizabeth Barton	Exploring Observational Parameter Space at Very High Redshifts (I)

Thursday March 11

Time	Speaker	Title
8:00 am	Registration
Challenges IV: Hunting for the First Galaxies, continued       (session chair: Francoise Combes)
8:45 - 9:15 am	Garth Illingworth	The Cosmic Star Formation Rate Density since z ~ 10: Constraints on Galaxies in the First Gyr (I)
9:15 - 9:30 am	Rychard Bouwens	Very Blue UV-Continuum Slopes of Star-Forming Galaxies at z ~ 7-8 and the Evolution to z ~ 2-4 (C)
9:30 - 9:45 am	Steven Finkelstein	Stellar Populations of Galaxies at 6.3 < z < 8.6 (C)
9:45 - 10:00 am	Ranga Ram Chary	The Stellar Initial Mass Function at the Epoch of Reionization (C)
Challenges V: Early Black Holes and the Assembly of SMBH       (session chair: Karl Gebhardt)
10:00 - 10:45 am	Zoltan Haiman	The Origin and Detection of High-Redshift Supermassive Black Holes (R)
10:45 - 11:15 am	Coffee Break
11:15 - 11:40 am	Milos Milosavljevic	Accretion Physics for the First Massive Black Holes (I)
11:40 - 12:05 pm	Daniel Whalen	Mechanisms for SMBH Seed Formation (I)
12:05 - 12:30 pm	Rogier Windhorst	How will the James Webb Space Telescope measure First Light, Reionization, and Galaxy Assembly in the post WMAP-7 and WFC3 era? (I)
12:30 - 2:30 pm	Lunch / Primeval Galaxy Formation Working Group (chairs: Zoltan Haiman, Garth Illingworth) WG 4 slides
2:30 - 2:55 pm	Chris Carilli	The Host Galaxies of z=6 Quasars: Gas, Dust, Star Formation, and M-sigma (I)
2:55 - 3:10 pm	Ataru Tanikawa	Successive Merger of Multiple Massive Black Holes in a Primordial Galaxy (C)
3:10 - 3:25 pm	Dominik Schleicher	Molecular Line Detection in High-z AGN by ALMA (C)
3:25 - 4:00 pm	Coffee Break
The Roadmap Ahead       (session chair: Eiichiro Komatsu)
4:00 - 4:30 pm	Joe Silk	First Stars and Galaxies, the Roadmap Ahead: Theory (R)
4:30 - 5:00 pm	Discussion / Working Group Reports
5:00 - 5:30 pm	Jonathan Gardner	First Stars and Galaxies, the Roadmap Ahead: Observation (R)
5:30 - 6:00 pm	Discussion / Working Group Reports