Events Archive

Hamilton Colloquium Series: Frans Pretorius, Princeton; "The Dynamical Strong-field Regime of General Relativity"
Thu, Sep 29, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

In this talk I will describe the recent detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration. The main event heard, GW150914, is consistent with the emission of gravitational waves from the late inspiral, merger and ringdown of two heavy stellar mass black holes. Many aspects of this event are fortuitous and remarkable, and I will…

Hamilton Colloquium Series: Ryan Patterson, Caltech; “Next questions in neutrino physics and the NOvA experiment”
Thu, Sep 22, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Non-zero neutrino mass brings with it new complexity in the neutrino sector, and major questions surrounding neutrino masses and mixing remain unanswered. Among the unknowns are the ordering of the neutrino masses, key details of flavor mixing, and whether neutrinos respect CP symmetry. NOvA, a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment…

Hamilton Colloquium Series: John Ellis, King's College London & CERN; “Radioactive Iron Rain: Evidence of a Recent Nearby Supernova Explosion”
Thu, Sep 15, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

A very close supernova explosion could have caused a mass extinction of life in Earth. In 1996, Brian Fields, the late Dave Schramm, and the speaker proposed looking for unstable isotopes such as Iron 60 that could have been deposited by a recent nearby supernova explosion. A group from the Technical University of Munich has discovered Iron 60…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Harald Hess, HHMI Janelia Research Campus: "Innovating Microscopy: From Atoms to Biology"
Thu, Apr 21, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Microscopy has played important roles in revealing new insight in diverse fields of research ranging from physics to biology. It likewise is an important component of controlling nano-scale structures in the semiconductor industry. I will trace my own path of adapting various forms of scanned probe microscopy to image vortices, electrons, and…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Vladan Vuletic, MIT: "What does the Golden Ratio have to do with friction? An answer atom by atom."
Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Friction is the basic, ubiquitous mechanical interaction between two surfaces that results in resistance to motion and energy dissipation. To test long-standing atomistic models of friction processes at the nanoscale, we have implemented a synthetic nanofriction interface using laser cooled ions subject to the periodic potential of an optical…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - David Snoke, U. Pittsburgh: "Superfluids of light: Bose-Einstein condensation of polaritons in microcavities"
Thu, Mar 31, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

In specially designed solid microcavities, the photon properties can be altered to have effective mass and repulsive interactions; these new states are called "polaritons". The polaritons act like atoms, and because they are bosons, they can undergo Bose-Einstein condensation. The experiments on polariton condensation have shown truly…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Dam Thanh Son, University of Chicago: "Surprises with Dirac fermions in condensed matter"
Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Starting with the discovery of graphene, the Dirac equation has appeared in many different contexts in condensed matter physics. In this talk I will describe two recent developments: the effects of chiral anomalies in Weyl and Dirac materials, and the Dirac nature of the composite fermion in the many-body physics of the half-filled Landau…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Kerstin Perez, Haverford: “In Search of Cosmic-Ray Antinuclei from Dark Matter”
Thu, Mar 3, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Cosmic-ray antiprotons have been a valuable tool for dark matter searches since the 1970s. Recent years have seen increased theoretical and experimental effort towards the first-ever detection of cosmic-ray antideuterons, in particular as an indirect signature of dark matter annihilation or decay in the Galactic halo. In contrast to other…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Joseph Curtin, Joseph Curtin Studios: “Can Stradivari’s Sound Be Measured?”
Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

A longstanding goal of violin research has been to establish objectively measurable parameters for violin quality. These would presumably substantiate one of the violin-world’s most passionately held beliefs: Violins made by Stradivari and his contemporaries in 18th Century Italy sound better than any made elsewhere or since. However, a team…

CANCELLED: Hamilton Colloquium Series
Thu, Feb 18, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

The colloquium talk that was scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 18 has been cancelled.
 

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Sebastian Seung, Princeton University: "Structure and function of the retina"
Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

The importance of determining and interpreting the structures of atoms, crystals, and proteins was established long ago. I will discuss current efforts to extend this paradigm to the brain, focusing on new discoveries concerning the structure of the retina gained through 3D electron microscopy, computer vision, and crowdsourcing. I will also…

Hamilton Colloquium Series: Steven Tobias, University of Leeds (UK), "Order from Chaos: From the Solar Cycle to the Jets on Jupiter"
Thu, Dec 10, 2015, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

The eleven year solar activity cycle is a remarkable example of regular behavior emerging from an extremely turbulent system. The jets on Jupiter sit unmoving on a sea of turbulent eddies. Astrophysical phenomena often display organization on spatial and temporal scales much larger than the turbulent processes that drive them. An outstanding…

Hamilton Colloquium: Curtis Callan, Princeton, "What can theoretical physics do for biology (and vice-versa)? Reflections of an ex-particle theorist."
Thu, Nov 19, 2015, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Living matter obeys the laws of physics, and the principles and methods of theoretical physics ought to find useful application in many areas of biology. This truism is becoming ever more relevant with the rapid growth of the ability of biological experiments to produce comprehensive quantitative data. After a broad survey of the theoretical…

Hamilton Colloquium - Bill Jones, Princeton, "The Universe as a Lab for Fundamental Physics: Results from Spider and future suborbital observations"
Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

I will describe our recent cosmological results from observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background, including a status report on the recent flight of the Spider experiment, a balloon borne CMB polarimeter. I will also discuss a convergence of observational needs and technological capabilities that provide intriguing opportunities for…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Neil Turok, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada, "Big Bang: Bounce or Beginning?"
Thu, Oct 22, 2015, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

We are fortunate to live at a time when questions about the origin and future of the universe are becoming accessible to scientific inquiry, primarily through observational advances but also through the development of new theoretical ideas. One popular picture is that the very early universe underwent an extraordinary burst of exponential…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Laura Baudis, University of Zurich, "Direct detection of dark matter in the Milky Way"
Thu, Oct 15, 2015, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Cosmological observations and the dynamics of the Milky Way provide strong evidence for an invisible and dominant mass component that so far reveals its presence only by its gravitational interaction. If the dark matter is made of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), it can be directly detected via elastic scattering from nuclei in…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Sheldon Stone, Syracuse University, "Pentaquarks and Tetraquarks at LHCb"
Thu, Oct 8, 2015, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

I will discuss the discovery of two pentaquark states both decaying into a J/ψ meson and a proton. The decay mode defines the quark content as c cbar, u, u, d, and thus are called charmonium pentaquarks. These exotic structures are found in Λb→J/ψ K- p decays using a full amplitude analysis using 7 and 8 TeV pp collisions from 3/fb of data…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Alexander Polyakov, Princeton University, "In praise of quantum field theory"
Thu, Oct 1, 2015, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Quantum field theory provides a universal language for very different areas of physics. I will try to demonstrate this by briefly discussing some fundamental problems, both solved and unsolved. The problems will include (if time permits) critical phenomena and conformal bootstrap, quark confinement and gauge/string duality, cosmological…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Gil Refael, CalTech, "Floquet quantum states: topological transitions, steady states, and suprising implications"
Thu, Sep 24, 2015, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Recent work has shown that manipulating a quantum system using a periodic drive provides a new means for externally controlling it. Such a periodic drive can give rise to topological states in trivial quantum wells, bulk semiconductors, and even in graphene; and it can also turn a quantum wire into a system which could have Majorana states -…

Hamilton Colloquium Series- Pasquale Blasi, INAF-Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, Florence,Italy,"Cosmic Rays: a journey from accelerators to Earth"
Thu, Apr 16, 2015, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

The bulk of cosmic rays originate in the Milky Way, most likely in supernova explosions. I will discuss the physics aspects of the interaction between charged particles and the environment that are at the very basis of both particle acceleration and propagation throughout the Galaxy and beyond. While we learned a lot from recent cosmic ray and…