Past Events

Sep

19

Lecture

Physics Colloquium: "25 Years of the Chandra X-ray Observatory" Presented by Dr. Melania Nynka - MIT

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

September 19, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

25 years ago X-ray astronomy was changed forever with the launch of the Chandra X-ray Observatory.   Chandra is one of NASA's flagship Great Observatories (аlong with the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope) and provides us with the sharpest X-ray images…

Sep

12

Lecture

Physics Colloquium: "All Stressed-Out: How Curvature and Tension Control Crystallization and Assembly in Two-Dimensional Complex Fluids" Presented by Dr. Maria Santore - University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

September 12, 2024, 4:25 - 5:25pm

Flexible electronics and function-integrated synthetic skins or coatings require ultrathin flexible films, able to dynamically conform to complex shapes while reconfiguring internal constituents to alter their properties and connectivity.  We consider phospholipid lamellae as a…

Sep

5

Lecture

Physics Colloquium: "Diving into an Ocean World: NASA’s Hunt for Habitability with the Europa Clipper Mission" Presented by Dr. Tracy Becker - Southwest Research Institute

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

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

Jupiter’s moon, Europa, harbors a liquid water ocean under its icy surface. NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission, set to launch in October 2024, will explore this ocean world with a suite of instruments designed to assess its habitability. I will present the scientific studies that have led…

Aug

29

Lecture

Physics Colloquium: "Understanding how supercooled water droplets freeze" Presented by Dr. Claudiu Stan - Rutgers

Location:

Lewis Lab 316

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

Supercooled water drops are often used for studying supercooled water and ice nucleation. They also occur naturally in clouds, where their freezing impacts the formation of precipitation and the radiative balance of Earth. The freezing of supercooled water drops is a complex…

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 the…

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 excitation,…

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 strong…

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 example…

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 collective…

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 puzzling…