Abstract: Merritt Moore will discuss her journey as a physicist and professional ballet dancer. She will discuss why studying physics made her a better dancer, with a career spanning across the Zurich Ballet, Boston Ballet, English National Ballet, and Norwegian National Ballet, and why being a ballerina helped her graduate…

Abstract: Fundamental physics generates new mathematics. String theory and quantum field theory leverage exact and infrared dualities to provide equivalent descriptions of physical objects, some of which admit rigorous definitions; dual pairs of objects are sometimes even formalized using two a priori distinct areas of…

Superconducting circuits have emerged as a competitive platform for quantum computation, satisfying the challenges of controllability, long coherence and strong interactions. Here we apply this toolbox to a different problem: the exploration of strongly correlated quantum materials made of microwave photons. We develop a versatile recipe that…

The QCD axion, originally proposed as a solution to the strong CP problem, is also a well motivated dark-matter candidate. Recently, a number of experimental proposals have emerged to search for QCD axion dark matter over the entire allowed mass range (~1 peV-1 eV). I discuss fundamental limits on searches for QCD axion dark matter, subject to…

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) is a general purpose high energy particle detector which was installed on the International Space Station (ISS) on May 19, 2011 to conduct a unique long term mission of fundamental physics research in space. To date, AMS has collected more than 130 billion charged cosmic rays with energies up to multi TeV…

Abstract: Measurements of the fine-structure constant alpha require methods from several subfields and are thus powerful tests of the consistency of theory and experiment in physics. Using the recoil frequency of cesium-133 atoms in a matter-wave interferometer, we recorded the most accurate measurement of the fine…

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Most searches for new physics at the Large Hadron Collider assume that a new particle produced in pp-collisions decays almost immediately, or is non-interacting and escapes the detector. However, a variety of new physics models predict particles which decay inside the detector at a discernible distance from the interaction…

Abstract: "With the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments in 2012, the fundamental question “Does the Higgs boson exist?” was replaced by “Is it really the Higgs boson of the standard model?”. In 2017, the observation of Higgs boson decays to tau leptons with a rate compatible with that expected in the standard model…