Events Archive

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Yifang Wang, Institute of High Energy Physics (Beijing): "Daya Bay neutrino experiment and the future"
Thu, Dec 4, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Recently reactor neutrino experiments have made important contributions to the neutrino oscillation. I will introduce the Daya Bay experiment which observed for the first time the neutrino mixing angle θ13 with a statistical significance of 5.2 σ. The concept of the experiment, the detector construction and data analysis will be described. The…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - E.K.U. Gross, Max-Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Germany. (Please see title below.)
Thu, Nov 20, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

"How to make the Born-Oppenheimer approximation exact: A fresh look at potential energy surfaces and Berry phases in the vicinity of strong non-adiabatic couplings" The Born-Oppenheimer approximation is among the most fundamental ingredients of modern condensed matter physics. This approximation not only makes calculations feasible, it also…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Eva Halkiadakis, Rutgers University, "Searching for Supersymmetry with CMS Experiement at the LHC"
Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has had a successful Run I. It provided the highest energy proton collisions to-date to the experiments, at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. In 2012, the observation of a new Higgs-like boson was announced to the world. There is also an extensive program at the LHC to search for physics beyond the Standard…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Slava Rychkov, CERN, and ENS-Paris, “Non-Hamiltonian approach to conformal quantum field theory – 40 years later”
Thu, Nov 6, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Most takes on quantum field theory start from microscopics, fundamental degrees of freedom, a Lagrangian. Conformal field theory is an exception—it focuses on the algebra of local operators and avoids any reference to the Lagrangian. This leads to a method for doing practical CFT calculations—the conformal bootstrap. The method is 40 years old…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Michael Gordin, Dept. of History, Princeton, “Einstein in Bohemia: Not-So-General Relativity, 1911-1912”
Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

In the spring of 1911, Albert Einstein moved from Zurich to the German University in Prague, taking up his first appointment as a full professor. Heavily on his mind was a project to extend the special theory of relativity (1905) to a general theory of relativity, building from his 1907 inspiration on the equivalence of inertial and…

Hamilton Colloquium Series- Leslie Rosenberg, University of Washington, "Searching for Dark-Matter Axions"
Thu, Oct 9, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

The axion is a hypothetical elementary particle whose existence would explain the baffling absence of CP violation in strong interactions. Axions also happen to be a compelling dark-matter candidate. Even if dark-matter axions were to comprise the overwhelming majority of mass in the universe, they would be extraordinarily difficult to detect…

Hamilton Colloquium Series- David Huse, Princeton University, "Quantum thermalization, many-body Anderson localization, and the entanglement frontier"
Thu, Oct 2, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Progress in physics and quantum information science motivates much recent study of the behavior of extensively-entangled many-body quantum systems fully isolated from their environment, and thus undergoing unitary time evolution. What does it mean for such a system to go to thermal equilibrium? I will explain the Eigenstate Thermalization…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Thomas Gregor, Princeton, "Precision and reproducibility in development"
Thu, Sep 18, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
Identical body plans across a species result from precise and reproducible embryonic development. However, the environment for developmental processes can be quite variable, and crucial signals inside the embryo are carried by so few molecules that we might expect development to be noisy. It is thus unclear how precision is achieved along the…
Hamilton Colloquium Series - Matthew P.A. Fisher, UC-Santa Barbara, "Quantum Tapestries"
Thu, May 1, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
Within each of nature’s crystals is an exotic quantum world of electrons weaving to and fro. Each crystal has its own unique tapestry, as varied as the crystals themselves. In some crystals the electrons weave an orderly quilt. Within others, the electrons are seemingly entwined in a entangled web of quantum motion. In this talk I will describe…
Hamilton Colloquium Series - Yayu Wang, Tsinghua University, "Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect in Topological Insulators"
Thu, Apr 17, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

The anomalous Hall effect was discovered more than 130 years ago in a ferromagnet, where a Hall resistance exists even in the absence of an external magnetic field. The quantized version of the anomalous Hall effect has attracted much interest since the discovery of quantum Hall effect in the 1980s. A few years ago, it was proposed that the…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Mikhail Lukin, Harvard University, "Quantum Dynamics of Strongly Interacting Systems"
Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

We will discuss recent developments at a new scientific interface involving quantum many-body dynamics of strongly interacting systems. Combining advances in several sub-fields of physical science, this research is aimed at realizing new states of matter that can exist far from equilibrium, and exploring novel science and applications of such…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Matthias Troyer, ETH Zurich: "Validating Quantum Devices"
Thu, Mar 27, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
About a century after the development of quantum mechanics we have now reached an exciting time where non-trivial devices that make use of quantum effects can be built. While a universal quantum computer of non-trivial size is still out of reach, there are a number of commercial and experimental devices: quantum random number generators, quantum…
Hamilton Colloquium Series - Michael Peskin, Stanford U.: "Beyond the Higgs Boson: Further questions and expectations for the Large Hadron Collider"
Thu, Mar 6, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
The biggest recent news from particle physics is the discovery at the CERN Large Hadron Collider of a new particle with many properties of the long-sought Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson had been predicted by the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions. This discovery thus seems to fill a recognized gap in our understanding. But…
Hamilton Colloquium Series - Stanislas Leibler, The Rockefeller University, and IAS: "Ethology and Ecology of Simple Microbial Systems"
Thu, Feb 27, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
I will describe two recent experiments on simple microbial systems. In particular, in these experiments an effort has been made to develop a statistical description of the dynamics on different time scales, ranging from minutes to months. In this way I hope to illustrate some major difficulties connected with building an appropriate quantitative…
Hamilton Colloquium Series - Jun Ye, University of Colorado: "Ultracold Molecules - New Frontiers in Quantum and Chemical Physics"
Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm

Molecules cooled to ultralow temperatures provide fundamental new insights to molecular interaction dynamics in the quantum regime. In recent years, researchers from various scientific disciplines such as atomic, optical, condensed matter physics, physical chemistry, and quantum science have started working together to explore many emergent…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Gabriel Orebi Gann, UC-Berkeley: "Here Be Dragons: Mysteries of the Neutrino" - Updated
Fri, Feb 14, 2014, 12:00 pm1:00 pm

Neutrinos are one of the most fascinating particles that occur in nature: hundreds of millions of times smaller than the proton, the neutrino was once thought to be massless and to travel at the speed of light. Huge strides have been made in our understanding of neutrinos in past decades, with the resolution of the solar neutrino problem…

Hamilton Colloquium Series - Philip W. Anderson, Princeton University: "The Discovery of the Anderson-Higgs Mechanism"
Thu, Feb 6, 2014, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
Landau introduced the idea of the ground state of a condensed matter system as a “vacuum” and of the elementary excitations as “quasiparticles” moving in this vacuum. He and Tisza noted that spontaneous orderings such as magnetism could be thought of as spontaneous symmetry-breaking of this vacuum, and based theories of phase transitions on this…