College of Arts and Sciences

Fundamental Symmetries in Nuclei: Tackling the Strong Interaction and Hunting for New Physics

Nuclei and hadrons are “laboratories” for exploring nature’s fundamental interactions. In this talk, I discuss the theoretical challenges and advances in the interpretation of experimental tests of fundamental symmetries performed with these strongly interacting systems. This theoretical work has enabled us to exploit such tests to achieve a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Quantum Chromodynamics in the non-perturbative regime and to gain a powerful new tool in the hunt for possible physics beyond the Standard Model.

Host: Pavel Fileviez

Continue reading… Michael J. Ramsey-Musolf (U. Mass Amherst/T. D. Lee Institute/Shanghai Jiao Tong U)

Dr. Fujita’s talk will focus on his MRI company and give a “State of QED” address, and how its accomplishments plus smart business practices such as investing heavily in human and R & D have helped him build a company that is profitable and providing well-paying jobs in an advanced manufacturing environment. He will explain that innovation is the cornerstones of success, while reviewing the RF principles of MRI. QED was an early adapter to new technology, such as additive manufacturing, which QED refers to as “Direct Digital Manufacturing” or “DDM” which has helped the company remain an industry leader when presented with technological challenges and opportunities that had to be met in order to stay competitive.

Continue reading… Our MRI Startup Grows Up: QED and HealthCare in 2014 – Hiroyuki Fujita

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) has provided one of our most robust and powerful tools for learning about the contents and history of the universe. Temperature anisotropies mapped over a wide range of angular scales have given strong support to the basic 6-parameter “Inflationary Lambda Cold Dark Matter” cosmological model, and allowed us to measure those parameters exquisitely. For the past decade, several teams have been building instruments to search for a potential new signal from Inflation in the polarization of the CMB, of which the Bicep2 collaboration recently reported a detection. In this talk I will describe that signal,

Continue reading… Chasing Inflation – John Ruhl

The ultimate resolution of an image acquired by an optical system (a telescope or microscope) is governed by the laws of diffraction and can be expressed as a limit in an optical transfer function (OTF). Typically, the OTF characterizing a given optical system is dominated by the physical properties of the principal optical element, for example the microscope objective. However, the optical “system” can be construed more broadly since the advent of fast digital imaging processing. Using new strategies the OTF can be “extended” to extract previously undetectable high spatial frequency information, and thereby “see” finer detail, by numerical processing of an appropriate series of diffraction-limited images.

Continue reading… Super-Resolution Microscopies at the Frontiers of Cell Biology (co-sponsored by the Institute for the Science of Origins) – Bill Dougherty

Continue reading… Results from the LUX dark matter search, and prospects for the future – Tom Shutt

Emulsions – dispersions of “guest” fluid droplets inside another “host” fluid – are very familiar in everyday life as food, consumer products and as raw materials such as crude oil. Despite their ubiquity, they exhibit fascinating and complicated physics. In this talk, I present some recent work on a class of materials, Pickering Emulsions, that also include colloidal particles. With applications ranging from food products to cosmetics via targeted drug delivery systems, the particles provide an efficient way to control an emulsion’s structure, properties and functions. For example, particles adsorbed on the interface of the droplets can be used to control the rate at which they coalesce,

Continue reading… Arrested Development (of Emulsions) – Tim Atherton

Carbon nanostructures such as nanotubes, nanofibers and graphene have gained great attention over the past two decades. Owing to their unique properties, these nanomaterials have been proposed for use in a wide range of applications. For example, carbon nanostructures typically exhibit high thermal conductivities, making them particularly attractive for thermal management of electronics. Accurate and efficient thermal characterization holds the key to understanding the thermal transport mechanisms in these materials to assure their continued development for novel applications. This presentation will describe the techniques used for the characterization of thermal transport in individual carbon nanostructures and nanocomposites such as the thermal flash technique,

Continue reading… Nanoscale thermal transport – Alexis Abramson

Liquid-crystal membranes have a coupling between curvature and orientational order: Defects in the orientational order can induce curvature, and conversely, curvature leads to an effective geometrical potential acting on defects. In this colloquium, we present basic introductions to liquid-crystal physics and to differential geometry, and discuss the fundamental origin of the coupling. In particular, we show that several different types of coupling are possible, depending on whether the membranes are fluid or cross-linked, and on whether the interactions are fundamentally two- or three-dimensional. These theoretical considerations can explain experiments on lipid vesicles and liquid-crystal elastomer films, and provide opportunities to design membranes that will relax into selected shapes.

Continue reading… Curvature and defects in liquid crystals and other soft materials: Differential geometry isn’t just for cosmology any more! – Jonathan Selinger

In spite of much discussion and a variety of efforts aimed at increasing the number of women in physics, the entry level into the field has hit a wall. For the past 15 years the percent of B.S. degrees in physics awarded to women has remained flat at about 20%. It is also worth noting that the representation of African American students in physics declined over this same period. Engineering and computer science fields show similar trends. What can we do to change this?

Continue reading… The Hunt for the Missing Components of the Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy . . . . and Women in Physics. – Evalyn Gates

More than 35 years after Mariner 10 made its third and final flyby of the planet Mercury MESSENGER (short for MErcury, Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) became the first spacecraft to orbit the planet in March of 2011. Among the primary goals of the MESSENGER mission are to map its surface, determine the composition of the planet and its exosphere, and to constrain the structure of its interior and the nature of the planetary magnetic field. We will discuss highlights of some of MESSENGER’s major discoveries with a focus on what we are learning about both the construction and the evolution of the interior of the innermost planet.

Continue reading… Mercury’s interior: New views from MESSENGER – Steven Hauck

Dr. Martin Snider (Biochemistry) on the prize for Medicine or PhysiologyDr. Michael Weiss (Biochemistry)on the prize for ChemistryDr. Glenn Starkman (Physics) on the prize for Physics

Continue reading… The 2013 Science Nobel Prizes – What were they given for? – Martin Snider, Michael Weiss, Glenn Starkman

Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the universe, yet there is a surprising amount of information we still do not know about them. The discovery of neutrino masses and mixing over a decade ago has raised a large number of challenging questions about neutrinos and their connections to the world we live in. After briefly reviewing what we have learned about neutrinos so far, we will examine these open questions, explain why they are interesting, and discuss plans for answering them in future experiments.

Continue reading… Next Steps in Neutrino Physics – Geralyn Zeller

I will review the basic scientific fundamentals behind human-caused climate change, including a discussion of physics-based theoretical climate models. I will motivate the use of a very simple (“zero-dimensional energy balance”) model of Earth’s climate. I will demonstrate, through applications of the model, how it can be used to address a number of outstanding scientific issues related to human-caused global warming. I will also discuss some of the societal implications of this work.

Continue reading… The Physics of Climate Change – Michael Mann