Events Archive

Cells in our body move in groups during development, wound healing, and tumor spreading. Bacterial cells also coordinate their motion to aggregate into biofilms, to feed cooperatively, and to form fruiting bodies.

The National Academy has recently called for the US to adopt a strategy to produce fusion electricity from a compact pilot plant by mid-century. This approach requires innovations in technology (e.g. magnet systems and power handling systems) and innovations in physics.

Building a quantum computer in the highly manufacturable material silicon offers many advantages. Phosphorus atom qubits in silicon in particular have demonstrated extremely long (up to 35 s) coherence times with >99.9% fidelity.

Moiré patterns are ubiquitous in layered van der Waals materials and can now be fabricated with considerable control by combining mechanical exfoliation of van der Waals layers with tear and stack device fabrication techniques.  I will explain why the electronic and optical properties of two-dimensional semiconductors and semimetals are...

Quantising a black hole can be done starting with conventional physics. We just assume matter to keep the form of point particles until they come close to the horizon. The gravitational back reaction of these particles generates a novel relation between particles going in and particles going out, enabling us to transform in-going particles into...

Cosmological hypotheses and oracular dreams of grandly unifying all the forces of nature foretold: neutrinos might weigh a tiny bit, those elusive particles might blow up stars, and the protons (and your ashes) would transform into light in 1029 years.  Indeed, that man can live to 100, without the radioactivity in his bones killing him, proves...

Superstring theory is our best candidate for the ultimate unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Although predictions of the theory are typically at extremely high energy and out of reach of current experiments and observations, several non-trivial constraints on its low energy effective theory have been found.

Time-reversal symmetry is one of fundamental symmetries that can present in many quantum mechanical systems. It plays an important role in many-body quantum systems, as demonstrated, for example, in the physics of topological insulators. In this talk, I will discuss topology and quantum entanglement protected and detected by time-reversal...

What are the problems we can solve using a computer? is one of the very fundamental question in science. We will describe how do we use statistical physics to address this question. We will discuss what insights does physics bring to the field of algorithmic hardness and how is this insight used to develop better algorithms.