Title: Super Earths Post-Kepler: Towards Probabilistic Planetary Physics
Abstract: The number of detected small extrasolar planets has exploded in the last decade, increasing a thousand-fold thanks in large part to Kepler. Our understanding of planets smaller than Neptune has therefore been driven primarily by observations. As theorists endeavor to construct origin stories for the enormous diversity of exoplanet properties and system architectures, we have a unique opportunity to provide them with a coherent picture of the observed super-Earth population through quantitative and careful syntheses of many individual measurements. I will present some of my work towards this goal, detailing in particular the latest developments in the super-Earth mass-radius distribution and the connection between planet and host star abundances. Through these efforts, I have started developing a framework which will enable us to make self-consistent, integrated probabilistic statements about population-level planetary physics.