Briley Lewis (UCSB): "New Tools for Debris Disk Imaging: Keck/NIRC2-Pol and GRaTer-JAX GPU Models"

While protoplanetary disks reveal the earliest stages of planet formation, debris disks—like our own solar system's Kuiper Belt—provide insight into planetary evolution, such as the stage where volatiles (e.g. water) are delivered to terrestrial planets. Polarimetry is a particularly powerful technique for debris disk observations; light scattered off a dusty circumstellar disk is polarized, while the host star's light is unpolarized, creating a natural separation we can take advantage of. In this talk, I will discuss two new tools we can use for debris disk studies—the new NIRC2 polarimetry mode on the Keck II Telescope in Hawai'i that will provide cutting-edge observations of these disks, and the new GRaTer-JAX software that takes advantage of GPU computation to model debris disks—and what we expect them to add to our understanding of planet formation and evolution.