Astrophysics Seminar: The present and the future in modeling eclipsing binary stars
Andrej Prsa (Villanova University)
The number of eclipsing binary and multiple systems observed by large, high quality photometric surveys is downright staggering: with OGLE setting the standard, Kepler and TESS leading the way in photometric…
Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Active phases and phase transitions drive pattern formation in motile populations of bacteria.
Josh Shaevitz (Princeton)
The soil dwelling bacterium Myxococcus xanthus is an amazing organism that uses collective motility to hunt in giant packs when near prey and to form beautiful and protective…
High Energy Theory Seminar: Black Holes as Probes for Ultralight Dark Matter
Bruno Bucciotti (Scuola Normale Superiore)
I will discuss the possibility that dark matter is made of weakly interacting, very light scalar particles, briefly reviewing the strong theoretical motivations of this proposal. In a scenario where non-gravitational…
Center for Soft and Living Matter Special Seminar: Medium-range order and local structure fluctuations in metallic glass
Professor Xun-Li Wang, City University of Hong Kong
Amorphous materials have no long-range order, but there are ordered structures at short-range (2-5 Å), medium-range (5-20 Å), and even longer-length scales. While regular and semiregular polyhedra are…
Colloquium: Global Famine after Nuclear War
Alan Robock (Rutgers University)
The world as we know it could end any day as a result of an accidental nuclear war between the United States and Russia. The fires produced by attacks on cities and industrial areas would generate smoke that would…
High Energy Theory Seminar: MIT and Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University
Thomas Steingasser (MIT)
The SM Higgs sector is subject to two fine-tunings, manifesting in the hierarchy problem and the metastability of the electroweak vacuum. I will explain why these tunings, which were long believed to be independent,…
Astrophysics Seminar: From Stars to Quasars: Microlensing as a Tool for Galactic and Extra-galactic Discovery
Somayeh Khakpash (Rutgers University)
By analyzing the gravitational lensing effects of stars and planets in our galaxy, and other massive distant galaxies, microlensing provides unique insights into phenomena that are otherwise difficult to observe. In…
Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: “Fractal patterns in music”
Andrzej Herczyński (Boston College)
If aesthetic preferences are influenced by the fractal geometry of nature, scaling regularities would be expected in all art forms, including music. While a variety of statistical tools have been proposed to analyze…
High Energy Theory Seminar: The dynamics of dRGT massive gravity
Jan Kożuszek (Imperial College London)
After reviewing the motivation and challenges connected with the dRGT theory of ghost-free massive gravity, we discuss our recent progress in understanding non-linear dynamics of this model. In spherical symmetry,…
Astrophysics Seminar: The Present and Future of High-Energy Neutrino Astronomy
Naoko Kurahashi Neilson (Drexel University)
In the past decade, neutrino astronomy went from dream to reality with IceCube producing spectacular observations of the very first neutrino sources in the sky. Last year, the diffuse emission of the Galactic Plane…