Bryce Cyr - "Was There Even a Big Bang?"
The standard picture for the hot Big Bang does a fantastic job describing the thermal history of the universe, especially for mid-to-late times. It also has a number of shortcomings that cannot be explained within the framework it provides. In this talk, I will highlight the major problems with the hot Big Bang, and discuss how different very early universe models address these problems in an attempt to provide a coherent picture of the timeline of our Universe.
Ben Zitzer - "Cosmic-ray electrons in VERITAS data"
Cosmic-ray electrons and positrons (CREs) at GeV-TeV energies are a unique probe of our local Galactic neighborhood. CREs lose energy rapidly via inverse Compton scattering and synchrotron processes while propagating in the Galaxy, effectively placing a maximal propagation distance for TeV electrons of order $\sim$1 kpc. Within this window, production of CREs can come from a handful of known, nearby astrophysical sources capable of exciting CREs to that energy or from more exotic production mechanisms, like particle dark matter. In this presentation we'll discuss the status of a VERITAS measurement of the electron plus positron cosmic ray spectrum.