Astronomy seminar: "Lensing and Delensing: Results and Updates from BICEP/Keck and the South Pole Telescope"
Kimmy Wu (University of Chicago)
Gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) encodes information from the low-redshift universe. Therefore, its measurement is useful for constraining cosmological parameters…
Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "Odyssey in the Critical Landscape: Quantum Phase Transitions beyond the Landau Paradigm"
Zhen Bi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Phase transitions are among the most complex and intriguing phenomena in physics. The Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson-Fisher theory of phase transitions, associated with the onset of a spontaneously broken…
Joint High Energy Theory/Experiment seminar: "Higgs EFTs and the Geometry of EWSB"
Nathaniel Craig (UC Santa Barbara)
Effective field theories of the Higgs boson not only allow for the sensible interpretation of Higgs coupling measurements, but also optimize the development of experimental analyses. Since the discovery…
Mathematical Biology seminar: "Mathematical models in biological pattern formation"
Chuan Xue (Ohio State University)
I will discuss two mathematical problems in biological pattern formation. The first is on modeling concentric ring patterns formed in engineered bacterial colonies. I will first present a hybrid model…
Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "How life shapes the lifeless world: Self-organization and mechanics in biological active matter"
Shreyas Gokhale (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Biological systems are composed of soft deformable components that are mechanically actuated by active agents such as molecular motors that locally consume free energy to generate motion. Beyond their vital role in…
Advances in Biomedical Optics seminar series: "Diffuse Optics in Treatment Monitoring for Photodynamic Therapy"
Theresa Busch (University of Pennsylvania)
Condensed and Living Matter seminar: "Active and Adaptive Materials from Particle Assemblies"
Yifan Wang (California Institute of Technology)
Particulate materials, or granular materials, are collections of discrete solid particles ranging from nano- to macroscopic sizes. They are usually disordered, and are known to exhibit…
Astronomy seminar: "The Galaxy Star Formation Rate-Stellar Mass Correlation"
Eric Gawiser (Rutgers University)
A surprisingly tight correlation has been discovered between galaxies’ star formation rates (SFR) and stellar masses (M_*). We show that the evolution of the normalization of the SFR-M_*…
Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "A tale of two motilities: organismal adaptation to complex, changing environments"
Jasmine Nirody (Rockefeller University)
Motile organisms have developed strategies to move through natural environments, which are spatially complex and can fluctuate with time. Understanding the physics behind these strategies is important for bioinspired…