Recent Colloquia
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Monday Colloquium: Jean Philippe Bouchaud (CFM)
Nov 15, 2021
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4:30PM EST
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Zoom
Virtual
Crises & Tipping Points: From Statistical Physics to Social Sciences As P. W. Anderson wrote in 1972 in his article "More is Different", the behavior of large assemblies of individuals (/molecules) cannot be understood by extrapolating the behavior of...
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Monday Colloquium: Paul McEuen (Cornell University)
Nov 8, 2021
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4:30PM EST
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Zoom
Virtual
Microscopic Robots?! Can we build microscopic robots? Autonomous ambulatory creatures too small to be resolved by the naked eye? The brains are not the problem: a modern IC has tens of thousands of transistors in the area occupied by a paramecium. But two...
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Monday Colloquium: Haim Sompolinsky (Racah Institute of Physics and Harvard University)
Sep 27, 2021
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4:30PM EDT
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Zoom
Virtual
Emergence of Object Representations in Brain Sensory Hierarchies Humans and animals are able to recognize objects in high-dimensional sensory streams despite their sensitivity to low-level nuisance variables such as, orientation, pose, scale, location...
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Monday Colloquium: Lucile Savary (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon)
September 20, 2021
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4:30PM - 4:45PM EDT
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Zoom
Virtual
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Monday Colloquium: Martin Bazant (MIT) "Beyond Six Feet: A Guideline to Control Indoor Airborne Transmission of COVID-19"
Apr 19, 2021
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4:30PM EDT
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Zoom
Virtual
The current revival of the American economy is being predicated on social distancing, notably the Six-Foot Rule of the CDC, which offers little protection from pathogen-bearing aerosol droplets sufficiently small to be mixed through an indoor space. The...
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Monday Colloquium: Trevor David Rhone (RPI) "Data-driven studies of magnetic van der Waals materials"
Apr 12, 2021
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4:30PM EDT
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Zoom
Virtual
When the dimensionality of an electron system is reduced from three dimensions to two dimensions, new behavior emerges. This has been demonstrated in gallium arsenide quantum Hall systems since the 1980’s, and more recently in van der Waals (vdW)...
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Monday Colloquium: Janet Conrad (MIT) "Of Elephants and Oscillations"
Apr 5, 2021
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4:30PM EDT
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Zoom
Virtual
This talk explores next steps in the search for new physics in the neutrino sector. The discovery of neutrino oscillations has changed the way we think about our model of particle physics. We must now incorporate tiny neutrino masses into our theory, as...
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Physics Monday Colloquium: Kang-Kuen Ni (Harvard University) "Bringing Together Quantum Chemistry and Physics with Ultracold Molecules"
Mar 29, 2021
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4:30PM EDT
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Zoom
Virtual
Advances in quantum manipulation of molecules bring unique opportunities, including the use of molecules to search for new physics, harnessing molecular resources for quantum engineering, and exploring chemical reactions in the ultra-low temperature...
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Monday Colloquium: Dmitri Basov (Columbia University) "Live from New York: Polaritons in van der Waals materials"
Mar 22, 2021
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4:30PM EDT
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Zoom
Virtual
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Monday Colloquium: Maria Fyta (Universitat Stuttgart) "Nanometer-sized holes opened in materials for molecular detection"
Mar 15, 2021
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4:30PM EDT
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Zoom
Virtual
Nanometer-sized holes can be opened in materials in order to detect single molecules, sequence DNA and RNA or store information. Using computational means at various spatiotemporal levels, we attempt to understand the characteristics of nanopores in...
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Monday Colloquium: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (University of New Hampshire) "Large Scale Structure from Microphysics"
Mar 8, 2021
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4:30PM EST
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Zoom
Virtual
In this talk, I will describe my efforts to understand the nature of the mysterious dark matter. I provide an overview of the general problem and then describe my current approach to it, which is to characterize the behavior of a proposed dark matter...
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Monday Colloquium: Isaac Chuang (MIT) "Grand unification of quantum algorithms"
Feb 22, 2021
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4:30PM EST
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Zoom
Virtual
Modern quantum algorithms with provable speedups originate historically from three disparate origins: simulation, search, and factoring. Today, we can now understand and appreciate all of these as being instances of a single framework, recently created by...
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Monday Colloquium: Xiaoxing Xi (Temple University) "Scientific espionage, open exchange, and American competitiveness"
Jan 25, 2021
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4:30PM EST
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Zoom
Virtual
Watch the video See the transcript Amid rapidly escalating tension between the United States and China, professors, scientists, and students of Chinese ethnic origin as well as those engaging in academic collaborations with China are under heightened...
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Monday Colloquium: Lara Benfatto (Sapienza University of Rome) "Manipulating matter with light: the case of superconductors"
Nov 30, 2020
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4:30PM EST
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Zoom
Virtual
Broken-symmetry states in condensed matter offer the unprecedented opportunity to observe collective electronic modes behaving as particle-like excitations. Superconductors offers a plethora of collective excitations connected to amplitude (Higgs) and...
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Monday Colloquium: David Bensimon (CNRS & UCLA) "Temperature Independence of Somitogenesis and Critical Slowing Down"
Nov 16, 2020
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4:30PM EST
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Zoom
Virtual
Somitogenesis, the segmentation of the antero-posterior axis in vertebrates, is thought to result from the interactions between a genetic oscillator and a posterior-moving determination wavefront. The segment (somite) size is set by the product of the...
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Monday Colloquium: Joe Checkelsky (MIT) "Synthesizing “Toy Model” Quantum Materials"
Nov 9, 2020
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4:30PM EST
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Zoom
Virtual
Connecting theoretical models for exotic quantum states to real materials is a key goal in quantum material synthesis. Among such theoretical models, a “toy model” is one made deliberately simplistic in order to demonstrate new physical concepts and their...
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Monday Colloquium: Jesse Thaler (MIT) "Collision Course: Particle Physics meets Machine Learning"
Nov 2, 2020
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4:30PM EST
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Zoom
Virtual
Modern machine learning has had an outsized impact on many scientific fields, and particle physics is no exception. What is special about particle physics, though, is the vast amount of theoretical and experimental knowledge that we already have about...
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Monday Colloquium: Leonard Susskind (Stanford) "Some thoughts about string theory and the world"
Oct 26, 2020
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4:30PM EDT
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Zoom
Virtual
I will give you my perspective on where we are with respect to quantum gravity, string theory, and the so-called real world.
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Monday Colloquium: Ben Mazin (UC Santa Barbara) "Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors for Astrophysics, Biophysics, and Dark Matter Detection"
Oct 19, 2020
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4:30PM EDT
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Zoom
Virtual
Optical and near-IR Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors, or MKIDs, are superconducting detectors that can tell you the energy and arrival time of each individual photon without false counts. In this talk I will discuss the recent progress my group has...
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Monday Colloquium: Eric Heller (Harvard) "Blochbusting: The missing theory of resistivity in normal metals and superlattices "
October 5, 2020
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4:30PM - 5:30PM EDT
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Zoom
Virtual
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Monday Colloquium: Martin White (UC, Berkley), "Modeling large-scale structure for the golden era of cosmological surveys"
Sep 21, 2020
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4:30PM EDT
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Zoom event
Virtual
Martin White (UC, Berkley) "Modeling large-scale structure for the golden era of cosmological surveys" Abstract: The Universe we observe exhibits order on a wide range of scales, and the study of this large-scale structure provides one of our premier...
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Monday Colloquium: Keivan Stassun (Vanderbilt), "Advancing Diversity at the PhD Level in Physics"
Sep 14, 2020
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4:30PM EDT
In Person
Dear Physics Department Members – We’d like to draw your attention to our first colloquium of the season, given by Prof. Keivan Stassun, Professor of Physics & Astronomy, Vanderbilt University. In response to the shutdownSTEM meeting, the Equity and...
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