Department Colloquium: "The Universe as a Lab for Fundamental Physics: Results from Spider and Future Suborbital Missions"
William Jones (Princeton) Hosted by James Aguirre
I will describe our recent 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…
Condensed Matter seminar: "Wavefront Shaping for in vivo Brain Imaging"
Na Ji, Janelia Research Campus
There are about the same number of stars in our galaxy as there are neurons in our brain. To study stars and neurons using optical imaging, we face similar challenges of image degradation by aberrations and…
Condensed Matter seminar: “Do entangled polymers possess a shear banding instability?”
Peter Olmsted, Georgetown University
The original Doi-Edwards theory (1978) predicted that long entangled polymers should become unstable to homogeneous shear flow for shear rates exceeding the relaxation (reptation) time. At the time this seemed to…
Astro Seminar: "A Possible First Detection of High-Redshift Population III Stars"
Eli Visbal (Columbia)
The recent observation of CR7 (Sobral et al. 2015), the brightest Lyman-alpha emitter at z~7, could be the first detection of Pop III stars (i.e. stars formed from primordial/extremely metal-poor gas). CR7 has strong…
Department Colloquium: "Physics Opportunities at Future Circular Colliders"
Liantao Wang (U of Chicago) Hosted by Joe Kroll
Following the discovery of the Higgs boson, there has been a lot discussion about the next step in high energy physics. Among different options, a couple of newly proposed next generation circular colliders,…
Special Energy Cluster Seminar: "Tailoring the flow of light at the nanoscale with hyperbolic metasurfaces"
Alexander High, Harvard University
Metamaterials offer unprecedented control of the flow of light at nanoscale dimensions, critical for the realization of compact, energy-efficient optical computing. However, three-dimensional (3D) metamaterials…
Condensed Matter seminar: "Valley and spin dependent physics in two-dimensional van der Waals’ materials"
Kin Fai Mak, Pennsylvania State University
Electrons in two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals’ materials with a honeycomb lattice structure possess both the valley pseudospin and the spin degree of freedom (DOF). The valley DOF is associated with the degenerate…
Astro Seminar: "Cross Correlations with CMB Secondaries: Constraining Cosmological Parameters and Cluster Astrophysics"
Nicholas Battaglia (Princeton)
High resolution CMB experiments, such as ACT, SPT, and the Planck satellite are making precision measurements of the secondary anisotropies caused by the thermal Sunyaev Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect from galaxy clusters.…
Special Energy Cluster Seminar: "Quantum physics to address global energy challenges"
Michael Biercuk, University of Sydney
Quantum physics research is providing surprising new avenues to solve longstanding challenges in energy - from lossy power distribution systems to inefficient large-scale fertilizer production. In this talk, I…