Harvard University Department of Physics

Charge Order Driven by Fermi-Arc Instability in Bi2201

The understanding of the origin of superconductivity in cuprates has been hindered by the apparent diversity of intertwining electronic orders in these materials...

Evolutionary Forces in Humans and Pathogens

The genome revolution has created unprecedented opportunities to study human biology, evolution, and disease, and is making it possible to carry out unprecedented studies in the microbial pathogens that affect humans....

Elastic Instability of a Crystal Growing on a Curved Surface

Although the effects of kinetics on crystal growth are well understood, the role of substrate curvature is not yet established...

R.I.P. William Edelstein

Famous Harvard Physics alumnus, Dr. William A. Edelstein, passed away on February 10, 2014. Dr. Edelstein was a pioneer in the field of MRI and the primary inventor of spin-warp imaging which is still used in all commercial MRI systems.

2014 Salam Distinguished Lecture

Prof. Subir Sachdev delivered the 2014 Salam Distinguished Lecture titled "Theory of Quantum Matter: from Quantum Fields to Strings" at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics.

2014 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize

This year's Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize has been awarded to Prof. Philip Kim "for his discoveries of unconventional electronic properties of graphene".

REUNION and SYMPOSIUM for GRADUATE ALUMNI

Join us on Friday, April 4, 2014, as Harvard celebrates the venerable history of one of the country’s great physics programs. In exciting faculty symposia, we'll assess discoveries past, present, and potential, and we'll examine the ways in which physics - the most fundamental science - has become increasingly multidisciplinary, with graduate students working in biology, chemistry, and engineering labs across Harvard.

For more information, see the GSAS Reunion page.

PHYSICS HEADLINES

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Today

Physics Colloquium Tea
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"Attosecond Imaging with X-rays", Peter Abbamonte, UIUC
- The dawn of the 21st century has witnessed the development of the attosecond* laser, which has promised a revolution in ultrafast science. Cited by the journal Nature as the 22nd milestone in the history of light (the publication of Maxwell’s equations being milestone #2), the attosecond laser has heralded a new age of “attoscience” in which electron motion may be studied in real time.
  
  In this talk I will present an alternative approach to studying attosecond phenomena, which is based on inelastic x-ray scattering (IXS). Rather than using explicitly time-resolved techniques, our approach is to measure collective excitations in the frequency- / momentum- domain, and then use of state-of-the-art inversion algorithms to reconstruct the electron dynamics in real space and time. This approach is a generalization of x-ray crystallography techniques to the time domain, and has been used to make movies of electron dynamics with time resolution approaching 1 attosecond [=1e-3 femtosecond = 1e-18 sec]. I will describe our use of this method to study plasma oscillations in liquid water, excitons in insulators, and valence excitations in graphite and graphene.
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Tomorrow

Special CMP Seminar: Tarun Grover
- Title: Stability of Highly Entangled Quantum Phases
  
  Abstract: Strong correlations can lead to quantum phases with remarkable features, such as, emergent fermions in a bosonic system, or phases which even lack a sharply defined quasiparticle. Given their scarcity, a fundamental question is: when are such "fractionalized" phases stable? In this talk, I will introduce the recently discovered deep relation between quantum entanglement and the renormalization group, and I will employ it to develop a new, non-perturbative approach for determining the stability of several gapless fractionalized phases. I will also discuss a general argument which shows that the phase transitions out of topological phases necessarily lie beyond the conventional Landau paradigm.
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Jaroslav Trnka (Caltech) "The Amplituhedron"
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Wednesday, March 12th

HQOC/ITAMP Joint Quantum Sciences Seminar - Paola Cappellaro
- Title Title: Quantum Control for Efficient Metrology
  Abstract: The success of quantum-enhanced sensors relies on precise control of the experimental systems to protect them from undesired sources of noise. Unfortunately, simple application of known strategies to reduce decoherence does not necessarily translate into an improvement of phase measurements: techniques-such as dynamical decoupling-that eliminate the very signal that one wishes to measure.
  
  In this talk, I will show how to extend control techniques to quantum metrology tasks, achieving a better and more flexible compromise between sensitivity and noise protection. In addition, tailoring the sensor dynamic can help reveal temporal and spatial information about the target.
  
  We can, for example, use coherent control of quantum sensors to simultaneously reconstruct the arbitrary profile of time-varying fields and correct for unwanted noise sources; or we can achieve high frequency resolution, thus allowing precise spectroscopy.
  
  I will illustrate application of these strategies in experimental implementations based on the Nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond.
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Qi Wen; WPI
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Thursday, March 13th

CMP Seminar: Richard Davison, Leiden University
- Title:
  Momentum dissipation and transport in holography
  
  Abstract:
  Holography can be used to study the physics of strongly coupled quantum
  field theories at finite density, which may be at work in certain real
  materials. However, the conservation of momentum in these field theories
  means that they have unrealistic transport properties, such as an infinite
  electrical conductivity. I will give a summary of recent progress in
  constructing gravitational solutions which are dual to field theories
  which dissipate momentum. I will explain how these gravitational solutions
  are related to theories of massive gravity, and what the transport
  properties of the dual field theories are. Finally, I will describe a
  simple mechanism, which is natural from the holographic point of view, by
  which strongly interacting metals can acquire a linear in temperature
  resistivity, as is observed in the strange metal phase of the cuprates.
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Jorge Rocha (CENTRA, Universidade de Lisboa) "Holographic collisions in confining theories"
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"Evolutionary Forces in Humans and Pathogens," Pardis Sabeti, Harvard
- SCIENCE LECTURE
  (The talks are designed for the interested public)
  
  The genome revolution has created unprecedented opportunities to study human biology, evolution, and disease, and is making it possible to carry out unprecedented studies in the microbial pathogens that affect humans. My lab’s research goals are to use the rapidly emerging resources to develop and apply methods to investigate natural selection in the human genome and study the genomic evolution of the microbial pathogens that affect humans including Lassa virus, Ebola, Plasmodium Falciparum, and Vibrio Cholerae.
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Monday, March 17th

No Physics Colloq Talk - Spring Break
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