Astro Seminar: "The Chaotic Life Cycles of Planetary Systems"

Daniel Tamayo (University of Toronto)

The past two decades have seen the discovery of thousands of new planetary systems in our galactic neighborhood, many of which look drastically different from our own. However, despite this remarkable observational…

HET & HEE Joint Seminar: "Unification from Scattering Amplitudes"

Cliff Cheung (Caltech)

Scattering amplitudes are fundamental observables that encode the dynamics of interacting particles. In this talk, I describe how to systematically construct these objects without reference to a Lagrangian or an…

High Energy Theory Seminar: "Coarse-Graining Holographic Entanglement"

Netta Engelhardt (Princeton)

Astro Seminar: "Cosmic Microwave Backlight: Illuminating Large-Scale Structure with the Universe's Oldest Photons"

Colin Hill (IAS/Flatiron Institute)

Studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation have driven the current era of precision cosmology.  The tightest cosmological constraints to date have been derived from the primary CMB anisotropies, which…

Condensed Matter Seminar: "Structure and Topology of Band Structures in the 1651 Magnetic Space Groups"

Ashvin Vishwanath (Harvard University)

We describe a powerful theoretical approach to studying electronic band structures, which associates them with elements of a vector space. The set of consistent band structures in a space group can then be expanded…

Astro Seminar: "Moving Mesh Astrophysics"

Paul Duffel (UC Berkeley)

Novel methods in recent years have been developed for numerically solving the hydrodynamical and MHD equations relevant to all kinds of astrophysical flows.  I will first (briefly) present one such computational…

High Energy Theory Seminar: "Some New Mechanisms for Baryogenesis"

Jeremy Sakstein (U of Penn)

There is more matter than antimatter in the universe, and the origin of this asymmetry is still a mystery. The asymmetry can be generated dynamically in the early universe in a process referred to as baryogenesis but…

Condensed Matter Seminar: "Enhanced optical and magnetic microscopy by orientation-dependent modulation of single-molecule and nitrogen-vacancy-center emission"

Mikael Backlund (Harvard University)

Selection rules impose geometrical constraints on the interactions of light and matter. In
particular, an emitter with a well-defined orientation will emit photons of a characteristic
polarization and…

Astro Seminar:"Probing Galaxy Formation with Modern Cosmological Simulations"

Paul Torrey (MIT)

Cosmological simulations are among the most powerful tools available to probe the non-linear regime of cosmic structure formation.  They also provide a clear test-bed for understanding the impact that hydrodynamics…

Astro Seminar: "Turbulent Beginnings: A Predictive Theory of Star Formation in the Interstellar Medium"

Blakesley Burkhart (CfA)

Our current view of the interstellar medium (ISM) is as a multiphase environment where magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence affects many key processes. These include star formation, cosmic ray acceleration, and the…