Skip Navigation
Search

Colloquium

The colloquium is currently held at 3:45 PM on Tuesdays in Harriman 137. Cookies, tea and coffee are served from 3:30 PM outside the lecture hall.

Colloquium committee: Rouven Essig (Chair), Jennifer Cano (Vice Chair), Abhay Deshpande, Will Farr, Harold Metcalf, Jesus Perez Rios, Giacinto Piacquadio

Archive of colloquia from 1999 to the present


Fall 2024 Colloquia
Date Speaker Title & Abstract
Aug 27

Chang Kee Jung

Physics and Astronomy Department Chair
Stony Brook University

Chair's Colloquium


Chair's Colloquium Slides (PDF)
Sep 3

Rachel Bezanson

University of Pittsburgh

UNCOVERing astronomical gems from our backyard to the edges of the observable Universe


NASA's latest great flagship observatory, JWST, was built in part to reveal the earliest moments of cosmic history. In the 2 years since it began releasing data to the public, JWST has enthralled scientists and the public alike with the incredible images and spectroscopic information from astronomical objects as nearby as our solar system and beyond to the most distant reaches of the Universe. The astronomical community has set distance records, found galaxies that may be significantly larger than models suggest could exist, and demonstrated that in some cases galaxy and supermassive black hole formation was earlier and more rapid than we had ever expected. In this talk, I will highlight some of the exciting results from the UNCOVER (Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization (https://jwst-uncover.github.io/) Treasury program. The UNCOVER program began in November 2022 with ultradeep NIRCam images of the Abell 2744 cluster ("Pandora's cluster") and within the same observing cycle targeted ~700 JWST-selected objects with deep NIRSpec PRISM spectra. These rich data have enabled spectroscopic studies of anticipated galaxy populations, including some of the most distant galaxies at cosmic dawn and the lowest mass systems that reionized the Universe. However, the same dataset has also revealed the unexpected, including extreme early supermassive black holes, dusty quiescent galaxies, and even low mass brown dwarfs in our own Milky Way. When combined with the multitude of additional multiwavelength data from other early JWST observations and HST, Chandra, ALMA, the VLT, etc., UNCOVER has helped to establish Abell 2744 as one of the premiere extragalactic fields.

Sep 10

Chiara Mingarelli

Yale

The NANOGrav Experiment: current results and future directions


Galaxy mergers are a standard aspect of galaxy formation and evolution, and most large galaxies contain supermassive black holes. As part of the merging process, the supermassive black holes should in-spiral together and eventually merge, generating a background of gravitational radiation in the nanohertz to microhertz regime. An array of precisely timed pulsars spread across the sky can form a galactic-scale gravitational wave detector in the nanohertz band. I describe the current efforts to develop and extend the pulsar timing array concept, together with recent evidence for a gravitational wave background, and efforts to constrain astrophysical phenomena at the heart of supermassive black hole mergers.

Sep 17

David Gross

KITP
UCSB

Fifty Years of Quantum Chromodynamics (The Theory of the Strong Nuclear Force)


I shall discuss the past, present and future of this remarkable theory. 

Sep 24

Karsten Heeger

Yale

Probing the Nature of Neutrino Mass


Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the Universe and may hold the key to understanding the predominance of matter over antimatter in the cosmos.  The search for neutrinoless double beta decay is a unique way to probe the nature of neutrinos. Observing this process would demonstrate that the neutrino is its own antiparticle (Majorana particle), provide new means for generating mass, and would revise our foundational understanding of physics. CUORE, the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events, has created the coldest cubic meter in the known Universe for a bolometric search for this rare decay. In this talk, I will report on recent results from CUORE and the plans for CUPID, a ton-scale upgrade with neutrino mass sensitivity beyond the inverted mass ordering.

Oct 1

Ken Dill

Stony Brook University

The Origins of Life:  A new look at an old problem.  A physics perspective.


How did the first living cells come into being from the earth’s molecular soup about 4 billion years ago?  It appears to have been an unrepeatable singularity.  Despite much speculation – maybe RNA molecules came first, or proteins, or chemical networks – there’s not yet a consensus origins story.  We’ve taken a new look, from a physics perspective.  The first step must have been a non-equilibrium adaptive and stable stochastic process that drove an irreversible transition.  Also, although the question of how today’s biological proteins could have arisen from random sequences seems like a “needle-in-a-haystack” problem, such problems are often readily solved through the statistical physics  of disorder-to-order processes.  This new look is leading to specific experimental predictions, and our recent experiments look promising.

Oct 8

Eden Figueroa

Stony Brook University

Building the Quantum Internet of the US: The SCY-QNet collaboration.


The Quantum Internet (QI) concept was proposed in the late 2000s, inspired by advancements in network technologies and light-matter quantum interfaces. It is based on interconnecting quantum nodes, including quantum memories (QM) and entanglement sources, to distribute quantum entanglement between quantum network (QN) nodes. To achieve the benefits of the QI, such as long-distance entanglement distribution and networked quantum computing, one must integrate quantum operations across a collection of interconnected Hamiltonians, together with contemporaneous networking principles and layered architectures.

In this colloquium, we will present our implementation of a quantum-enabled Internet (QEI) based on this physics-centric layered network architecture. We will introduce a quantum network paradigm adopting an operational hierarchy allowing the execution of QN processes by simultaneously driving sets of remotely located Hamiltonians at QN nodes. We will also present the experimental realization of these concepts using a real-world quantum network connecting Stony Brook University, Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Commack Data Center. Lastly, we will discuss the Stony Brook – Columbia -Yale quantum network (SCY-QNet), which is an expansion of our current efforts, aimed to create a 10-node, 350 km long quantum internet prototype connecting advanced quantum processing units. 

Oct 15 -- No Colloquium. Fall Break.
Oct 22

Stefano Spagna

Quantum Design

Correlative Microscopy and Art of Instrument Design


Industrial Physics brings together people, education, and scientific principles in a powerful synergy that drives technological products and services essential to today’s U.S. economy. This presentation highlights one company’s leadership in cryogenic materials characterization platforms and explores how its success stems from identifying emerging technologies and transforming them into specialized measurement instruments tailored to solve real world challenges faced by the research community. A key factor of this success story involves partnerships with academic institutions and leading technology companies, nurturing innovative ideas from cutting-edge research conducted in labs worldwide. These collaborations benefit universities in a concrete way by modernizing and restructuring undergraduate and graduate laboratory research and education, developing experiment curricula that reflect the latest research and technological advancements, and reinforcing a commitment to innovation in STEM education.

In this presentation, we will also discuss specific innovations in fields ranging from magneto-optics to correlative microscopy. We will delve into the design elements and workflows made possible by Quantum Design’s award-winning Atomic Force and Scanning Electron Microscopy (AFM-SEM) systems, illustrating their importance in materials research, including studies of 2D materials, nanoparticles, magnetic nanorods, failure analysis, and semiconductor research. Additionally, we will explore how the emerging field of AFM-SEM correlative microscopy enables scientists to analyze a broader range of samples by leveraging the complementary strengths of each technique, generating a wider array of nanoscale information.

Key words: Industrial Physics, STEM education, AFM, SEM, Correlative microscopy, nanoparticles,
failure analysis, semiconductor research

Oct 29

Swati Singh

University of Delaware

Searching for dark matter and dark energy with mechanical systems


Abstract: When properly engineered, simple quantum systems such as harmonic oscillators or spins can be excellent detectors of feeble forces and fields. Following a general introduction to this fast-growing area of research, I will focus on using optomechanical systems as sensors of weak acceleration and strain fields. Ultralight dark matter coupling to standard model fields and particles would produce a coherent strain or acceleration signal in an elastic solid. I will discuss the feasibility of searching for this signal using various optomechanical systems. I will also show that current mechanical systems have the sensitivity to set new constraints on scalar field candidates for dark energy. Finally, I will briefly overview the promise of quantum noise limited detectors in the search for beyond the standard model physics.

Brief Bio: Swati Singh is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Material Science and Engineering, and Physics at the University of Delaware. Her theoretical work spans a wide range of quantum systems: atomic gases, optomechanical oscillators, solid-state qubits, and superfluid helium. Her recent work involves investigating novel applications for quantum sensors, such as detecting gravitational waves, dark matter, and dark energy. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award and ITAMP Postdoctoral fellowship. Previously, she was a postdoc at Harvard University, a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona, a Master's student at the University of British Columbia, and an undergraduate at McMaster University.

Nov 5 -- No Colloquium. Election Day.
Nov 12

Jesus Perez-Rios

Stony Brook University

The three-body problem in chemical physics


The three-body problem, such as three bodies interacting through gravity, is paramount in fundamental and mathematical physics. It is well-known that it has no closed solution, and the dynamics is chaotic. The equivalent problem in chemical physics is a termolecular reaction in which three bodies (chemicals) collide, yielding a bound state between two bodies while the third one gets the excess kinetic energy. Termolecular reactions are essential to many chemical and physical systems, from ultracold atoms, determining the system's stability, to plasma physics, explaining the recombination dynamics. In this talk, we will present our methodology for treating termolecular reactions and its application to several intriguing scenarios: cold chemistry, atmospheric physics, and geochemistry. Within cold chemistry, we will show the current understanding of ion-atom-atom recombination reactions essential to understanding the stability of cold ions for applications as a quantum simulator. On the atmospheric physics front, we will present our results on the ozone formation reaction, one of the most relevant reactions in atmospheric physics.  Regarding geochemistry, we will discuss our latest results on the sulfur cycle reactions essential to understanding the great oxygenation event, that moment in the history of our planet when the living organism transitioned from anaerobic to aerobic. Finally, we will present some of our efforts toward the theoretical understanding of cluster physics, solvation chemistry, and nucleation dynamics.

Nov 19

Eun-Ah Kim

Cornell

TBA.
Nov 26 -- No Colloquium. Thanksgiving Week.
Dec 3 -- TBA.

Archived Colloquium Schedules