High Energy Theory Seminar: Sphere packing, gravity, and the conformal bootstrap

Tom Hartman (Cornell University)
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I will describe recent progress on the connections between three topics: conformal field theory, the sphere packing problem, and quantum gravity in three dimensions. The link is provided by a technique…



Physics and Astronomy Colloquium: “The String Landscape and the Swampland"

Cumrun Vafa (Harvard University)
- NOTE: FROM NOW ON, ALL COLLOQUIA WILL BEGIN AT 3:00 PM!

String theory landscape of vacua point to new consistency conditions that a quantum gravitational system must satisfy.  There are only a small number of quantum field theories that satisfy these…



Thesis Defense: “Exploring relationships between structure, dynamics, and the effects of local perturbations in networks"

Lia Papadopoulos (University of Pennsylvania)
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Committee: Danielle S. Bassett (primary supervisor), Randall Kamien (chair), Eleni Katifori, Victor Preciado, Mirjam Cvetic



Primakoff Lecture: “The Life and Death of Turbulence”

Nigel Goldenfeld (University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign)
- Zoom

Turbulence is the last great unsolved problem of classical physics. But there is no consensus on what it would mean to actually solve this problem. In this colloquium, I propose that turbulence is most…



Mathematical Biology seminar: "Spatio-temporal heterogeneities in a mechano-chemical model of cell migration"

Andreas Buttenschoen (University of British Columbia)
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Small GTPases, such as Rac and Rho, are well known central regulators of cell morphology and motility, whose dynamics also play a role in coordinating collective cell migration. Experiments have shown…



High Energy Experiment Seminar: Track-triggering at CMS for the High-Luminosity LHC

Louise Skinnari (Northeastern University)
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The high luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scheduled for 2025-2027, will significantly increase the instantaneous luminosity of the LHC collisions. The resulting large proton-proton…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "Exploiting the Singh Center’s Nanoscale Characterization Facility in Condensed Matter Research"

Eric Stach (University of Pennsylvania)
- See Zoom link below

Over the past several years, there have been significant investments in instrumentation for electron and ion microscopy in the Singh Center. I spoke to this group in the Fall of 2017, outlining what were then ‘plans…



Astronomy Seminar: Assembly bias of cosmic neutral hydrogen with neural networks and symbolic regression

Jay Wadekar (NYU)
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Hydrodynamic simulations have a huge computational cost (~10 million CPU hours for 0.001 Gpc^3 volume), and cannot therefore be directly used in predictions for upcoming cosmological surveys which…