Past Events

May

2

Lecture

Physics Colloquium: Rapid-Turn Multifield Inflation in the Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background Presented by Dr. Sonia Paban - Harvard

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

May 2, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

Cosmic Inflation is thought to solve several problems in standard Big Bang theory. From a fundamental point of view, many viable inflation models remain despite recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations, which exclude some of the simplest chaotic inflation models. In…

Apr

25

Lecture

Physics Colloquium: Delivering laser performance conditions to enable fusion ignition and beyond at the National Ignition Facility Presented by Dr. Michael Erickson - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

April 25, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

On December 5th, 2022, controlled fusion ignition was demonstrated for the first time at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a major achievement in the field of Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) requiring a multi-decadal effort involving broad national and international…

Apr

18

Lecture

Physics Colloquium: Fractional quantum Hall effect and its "graviton" Presented by Dam Than Son - University of Chicago

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

April 18, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

The fractional quantum Hall effect is a remarkable physical phenomenon where electrons organize themselves into a strongly interacting fluid with nontrivial topological properties. It has recently been understood that the fractional quantum Hall fluids accomodate a spin-2…

Apr

11

Lecture

Physics Colloquium: “Designing and probing exciton quantum phase transitions in 2D semiconductors” by Yusong Bai - Brown University

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

April 11, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

Designing and harnessing quantum phases of matter is a central goal in modern physical sciences and information technologies. Quantum phases of matter are predominantly characterized as interacting many-body electronic systems. They often feature intricate interplay between…

Apr

4

Lecture

Physics Colloquium - "Moiré Materials" Presented by A.H. MacDonald - UT Texas, Austin

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

April 4, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

The advent of two-dimensional materials in recent years has opened a new opportunity to design quantum metamaterials in which many-particle matter waves waves exhibit strongly-correlated and topologically non-trivial properties that are rare in naturally occuring crystals. For…

Mar

28

Event

Physics Colloquium - "Intimations of universality in nonequilibrium strongly correlated quantum systems" Presented by Professor Aditi Mitra - New York University

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

March 28, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

It has been hard enough determining the ground states of strongly interacting quantum systems, is the study of their nonequilibrium properties totally hopeless? In this talk I will give an overview of recent results obtained in my group and elsewhere where it has been shown that…

Mar

21

Lecture

Physics Colloquium - "Electrifying active matter" Presented by Professor Petia Vlahovska - Northwestern University

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

March 21, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

Bird flocks and fish schools move around like fluid when viewed on a scale much larger than the individuals. Similar large-scale coherent motions have been observed with self-propelled micro-particles such as bacteria and motile colloids. In this talk, I will discuss the…

Feb

29

Lecture

Physics Colloquium - "Exotic Phases in Moire Systems" Presented by Professor Bogdan Andrei Bernevig, Princeton University

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

February 29, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

I will review the experimental discoveries and amazing puzzles in Twisted Bilayer Graphene and in twisted MoTe2 which culminated with the discovery of long-thought phases of matter such as the Fractional Chern Insulator. We will then show that, theoretically, most of the…

Feb

22

Lecture

Physics Colloquium - "The Entropy of Hawking Radiation" Presented by Dr. Maldacena - IAS, Princeton

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

February 22, 2024, 4:25 - 5:55pm

We will discuss recent progress on the computation of black hole entropy and the entropy of Hawking radiation. This involves an area formula that computes the fine grained or von Neumann entropy of black hole. The result is consistent with unitarity.

Feb

15

Lecture

Physics Colloquium - "Inquiring Through Black Holes" Presented by Dr. Luis Lehner, Perimeter Institute

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

February 15, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

Black holes have become unique tools in the understanding of a plethora of phenomena in vastly different fronts. From understanding spectacularly energetic events in our universe, gaining insights on potential new particles to unraveling seemingly unrelated phenomena through a…

Feb

8

Lecture

Physics Colloquium - "Collective Functionalities Emerging in Microbial Active Matter" Presented by Dr. Mathijssen, University of Pennsylvania

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

February 8, 2024, 4:25 - 5:55pm

 Microbes often cooperate to withstand predators and compete even with multicellular organisms. Together, they can achieve functionalities that alone they cannot. However, this puzzle of how biological self-organization emerges from the collective dynamics of individual…

Feb

1

Seminar

Physics Colloquium - "Solving the Mott Problem" Presented by Professor Philip Phillips, UIUC

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

February 1, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

Superconductivity in the copper-oxide ceramics remains a grand challenge in theoretical physics because of the paucity of tools to treat strongly coupled systems.  In such systems, all intuition based on single-particle physics fails.  Precisely what the propagating…