Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "Phases, geometry, and scales: bridging micro to macro in animal locomotion"
Jennifer Rieser (Emory)
Animals move through the terrestrial world in a variety of ways – burrowing, crawling, running, jumping, climbing, and building. Successful movements, often crucial for survival, depend sensitively…
HET Seminar: Enstrophy and black hole supertranslations
Natalia Pinzani-Fokeeva (MIT)
Enstrophy is an approximately conserved quantity in 2+1 dimensional non relativistic fluids that implies an inverse energy cascade in turbulent flows. In this talk, I will present an algorithm on how to…
Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "Optical Sensing of Moiré Physics in Semiconducting Moiré Superlattices"
Chenhao Jin (UCSB)
Moiré superlattices formed between two-dimensional (2D) materials provide new opportunities to engineer novel quantum phenomena, as exemplified by the intriguing observations in twisted bilayer graphene (…
Astronomy Seminar: Towards precision measurements of dark matter
Sukanya Chakrabarti (Rochester Institute of Technology/IAS)
For more than a century now, our inference of the mass distributions (including dark matter) in galaxies have been based on modeling the positions and velocities of stars, i.e., using kinematic analyses,…
High Energy Seminar: Automorphic Spectra and the Conformal Bootstrap
Sridip Pal (Institute for Advanced Study)
We point out that the spectral geometry of hyperbolic manifolds provides a remarkably precise model of the modern conformal bootstrap. As an application, we use conformal bootstrap techniques to derive…
Thesis Defense: "Cosmology and Astrophysics from small scales"
Shivam Pandey (University of Pennsylvania)
Committee members: Bhuvnesh Jain, Mark Devlin, Ravi Sheth (Chair), Elisabeth Krause (from University of Arizona) and Jonathan Heckman
HET Seminar: Renormalization Group Flow as Optimal Transport
Jordan Cotler (Harvard)
We establish that Polchinski's equation for exact renormalization group flow is equivalent to the optimal transport gradient flow of a relative entropy. This…
Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "Topological Defects in Smectic Liquid Crystals: Applied Measured Foliations"
Randy Kamien (University of Pennsylvania)
Smectic liquid crystals are layered systems that abound in nature. I will introduce these materials and show how the long-lived, topologically protected
…
Astronomy Seminar: Andromeda as a Stepping Stone to the Local Volume: Chemodynamics of Extragalactic Streams and Shells
Massive galaxies like the Milky Way and Andromeda (M31) form in part from the accretion of less massive galaxies. The chemical and dynamical properties of disrupted galaxies, in the form of streams and…
Physics and Astronomy Colloquium: "The synergy of biophysics and active materials"
Arnold Mathijssen (University of Pennsylvania)
Understanding the physics of living systems allows us to design new materials that are active and adaptive, akin to cells and tissues. Conversely, these active matter systems…