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Nanophotonic Quantum Phase Switch with a Single Atom

Quantum optical switches are important elements of quantum circuits and quantum networks, analogous to transistors in classical electronic circuits. Operated at the fundamental limit where a single quantum of light or matter controls another field or material system...

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Subnanometre Resolution in Three-Dimensional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Individual Dark Spins

New MRI technique provides subnanometre spatial resolution in three dimensions, with single electron-spin sensitivity...

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The Morris Loeb Lecture in Physics: Marc Mézard

Colloquium (Apr 28): "The spin glass cornucopia"
Lecture I (Apr 29): "Phase transitions in hard computer science problems"
Lecture II (Apr 30): "Occam’s razor in massive data acquisition: a statistical physics approach"

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EPB Annual Symposium

On Saturday, April 26, the annual Engineering and Physical Biology (EPB) Symposium will be held in Room B103 of the Northwest Building, 52 Oxford St. Speakers from constituent fields - Physics, Engineering, Chemistry and Molecular Biology - will present significant recent findings ranging from the physics of protein conformation to DNA knotting.

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Gamma-Ray Emissions from Dark Matter?

Past studies have identifed a spatially extended excess of 1-3 GeV gamma rays from the region surrounding the Galactic Center, consistent with the emission expected from annihilating dark matter. Harvard Physics grad student Tansu Daylan, Prof. Douglas Finkbeiner, and researchers from Fermilab, University of Chicago, MIT, and Princeton revisited and scrutinized this signal with the intention of further constraining its characteristics and origin...

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Today

CMP Seminar: Koenraad Schalm, Leiden and Harvard
- Title: Far from equilibrium energy flow in quantum critical systems
  
  Abstract: We investigate far from equilibrium energy transport in strongly coupled quantum critical systems. Combining results from gauge-gravity duality, relativistic hydrodynamics, and quantum field theory, we argue that long-time energy transport after a local thermal quench occurs via a universal steady-state for any spatial dimensionality. This is described by a Lorentz boosted thermal state. We determine the transport properties of this emergent steady state, including the average energy flow and its long-time fluctuations.
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Joint Harvard / MIT Seminar: Hirosi Ooguri (Caltech) " Anomalies and Hydrodynamics in AdS/CFT"
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Saturday, April 26th

Engineering and Physical Biology Annual Symposium
- On Saturday, April 26, the annual Engineering and Physical Biology (EPB) Symposium will be held in Room B103 of the Northwest Building, 52 Oxford St. Speakers from constituent fields -Physics, Engineering, Chemistry and Molecular Biology - will present significant recent findings ranging from the physics of protein conformation to DNA knotting.
  
  As in the past, the EPB Symposium day has been organized to bring together students and faculty from three Harvard areas (MCB, Physics and SEAS) with outstanding visiting scholars. (For a review of last year’s Symposium, see https://www.mcb.harvard.edu/mcb/news/news-detail/3684/symposium-features-physical-biology-research/) EPB is now in its eighth year as a PhD track for students wishing to “probe living systems through the lens of physics and engineering.”
  
  The day will be divided into two parts. The morning (until 12:30 pm) will be a public symposium featuring four visiting faculty. (See poster to your right) The public is welcome to attend, and the talks should be of wide interest to the Harvard science community.
  
  The afternoon will feature graduate student presentations and discussions in a more intimate setting that should promote the cross-fertilization of disciplines that EPB encapsulates. (These sessions will not be open to the general public.)
  
  Work at physics and engineering interface is rapidly becoming an established part of the life sciences. EPB particularly welcomes members of the MCB community to engage with these speakers working on the frontiers of physical biology.
  
  Morning Schedule - Public Event:
  
  9:00 - 9:45:
  Marco Foiani Prof. of Molecular Biology, Dept. of Biosci., University
  of Milan and IFOM-IEO “Mechanosensing at the nuclear envelope: an ATR-mediated
  response to control cell plasticity”
  
  9:45 – 10:30
  Kerry Bloom Dept. of Biology, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  "The landscape of forces in mitosis"
  
  10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break
  
  11:00 – 11:45
  Jonathon Howard Eugene Higgins Prof. of Molecular Physics & Biochem., Yale University
  and Max Planck Inst., Dresden "Ciliary and flagellar motility: From single molecules to
  collective motion"
  
  11:45 – 12:30
  Olaf Sparre Andersen Prof. of Physiol. & Biophys., Weill Cornell Medical College
  "Interactions of drugs and other amphiphiles with membranes: Implications for membrane
  protein function and drug development"
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Monday, April 28th

Physics Colloquium Tea
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"The Spin Glass Cornucopia," Marc Mézard, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
- For more than 30 years, the spin glass puzzle has stimulated a large activity in statistical physics, and led to several breakthroughs. While the puzzle of spin glass materials is still not fully solved, their theoretical analysis has created a very rich conceptual framework, as well as powerful techniques, to study emergent properties of strongly disordered and interacting systems. These have been successfully applied to a broad spectrum of
  other disciplines, from finance to computer science and information theory, where slow -glassy- dynamics and phase transitions play a key role. The talk will survey this spin glass saga, focusing on its developments outside of physics.
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Tuesday, April 29th

“Phase transitions in hard computer science problems,” Marc Mézard, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
- A new field of research is rapidly expanding at the crossroad between statistical physics, information theory and combinatorial optimization. It deals with problems which are very important in each of these fields, like spin glasses, error correction, or satisfiability. In recent years, it has been realized that physical phenomena, familiar from glass phenomenology, occur in large classes of algorithms that have been developed to study some of the hardest computer science problems. Realizing that extreme slowdown and glassy phase transitions occur in computer programs is interesting both theoretically, as it opens new perspectives to the study of algorithmic complexity, as well as practically : it allows to develop new kind of efficient algorithms, inspired from insights obtained through the “replica method” and the “cavity method’’. This talk will survey these recent developments, focusing on the conceptual leap induced by the use of spin glass theory in hard constraint satisfaction problems.
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Anže Slosar (Brookhaven) "BICEP2 and the future of cosmological observations"
- I will give an overview of the recent BICEP2 detection of the primordial gravitational waves from an experimentalist's perspective, discussing reasons to believe the result and reasons to worry about. I will next discuss how this result, if confirmed, affects our priors about the inflation and planning of the future experiments. I will discuss which observables we should try to measure, how to do these measurements and what are the leading systematics.
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Wednesday, April 30th

“Occam’s razor in massive data acquisition: a statistical physics approach," Marc Mézard, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
- Science is facing several challenges related to data explosion. How to acquire a large amount of information in short time? How to extract significant data? In recent years, studies in compressed sensing have triggered very interesting developments on these issues. Compressed sensing consists in sampling a sparse signal at low rate, and later using computational power for its exact reconstruction, so that only the necessary information is measured. Currently used reconstruction techniques are, however, limited to acquisition rates larger than the true density of the signal. We shall describe new procedures, based on a statistical physics analysis, which is able to reconstruct exactly the signal with a number of measurements that approaches the theoretical limit for large systems.
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LPPC Seminar: Mike Kordosky
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Alain Karma; Northeastern University
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