College of Arts and Sciences

Continue reading… Jie Shan (Cornell)

New Date to be determined

Continue reading… RESCHEDULED Axel Hoffmann (Univ Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Rescheduled for Fall 2020

Continue reading… RESCHEDULED Terry Sejnowski (Salk Institute)

New date to be determined

Data Science in Art: Discerning the Painter’s Hand

Ken Singer, Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics

with

Michael Hinczewski, Assistant Professor of Physics

Ina Martin, Senior Research Associate (Physics), Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Betsy Bolman, Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts and Chair, Department of Art History and Art 

The Departments of Art History and Art, Physics, Materials Science and Engineering, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Institute of Art have been collaborating to investigate the application of machine learning (ML) to artist attribution based on confocal optical profilometry data from student-produced painting via the brushstroke texture. 

Continue reading… RESCHEDULED Ken Singer et al (CWRU Physics and Art History)

New date to be determined

Modeling liquid crystal elastomers: from auto-origami to responsive surfaces and a light-powered soft robot

Liquid crystal elastomers combine the orientational order of liquid crystals with the elasticity of polymers. Remarkably, these materials flex and deform reversibly, driven by stimuli such as  illumination or heating, and can be programmed to morph from simple to complex shapes. The material’s liquid crystal director field, indicating the direction of molecular alignment, defines the local axis of induced contraction. We use GPU-based finite element elastodynamics modeling to study how patterns with director gradients and  topological defects give rise to complex actuation. 

Continue reading… RESCHEDULED Robin Selinger (Kent State)

Building a quantum computer using silicon quantum dots
 
The steady increase in computational power of information processors over the past half-century has led to smart phones and the internet, changing commerce and our social lives.  Up to now, the primary way that computational power has increased is that the electronic components have been made smaller and smaller, but within the next decade feature sizes are expected to reach the fundamental limits imposed by the size of atoms.  However, it is possible that further huge increases in computational power could be achieved by building quantum computers, which exploit in new ways of the laws of quantum mechanics that govern the physical world.  

Continue reading… Susan Coppersmith (Wisconsin/New South Wales)

Interfacing quantum microwaves to spins and phonons

Circuit quantum electrodynamics is a currently very active field of research. Since the discoveries that an artificial spin, the so-called qubit, can be implemented using a superconducting non-linear circuit and can coherently interact with the electromagnetic field at the single-photon level, it has gathered strong interest for its potential for quantum computing but also for its ability to create, manipulate and detect microwave states with an exquisite precision. In this talk, I will present how the tools and concepts developed for quantum circuits can be used to interface microwaves and phonons,

Continue reading… Audrey Bienfait (ENS-Lyon) Michelson Postdoctoral Prize Colloquium

The Antikythera Mechanism: Discoveries Old & New

The Antikythera Mechanism, so named after the Greek island in whose waters it was salvaged in 1901 from a shipwreck datable to ca. 70-60 BCE, is a remarkable geared device that was constructed in the 2nd or 1st century BCE to calculate and display various astronomical, calendrical and athletic time periods. No device of comparable technological complexity is known until 1,000 years later. In 2005, a group of researchers known as the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP) examined the 82 fragments of this badly corroded and brittle device with two modern technologies called Micro-Focus X-Ray Computed Tomography (CT) and Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM,

Continue reading… Paul Iversen (CWRU Classics)

The Quest to Understand Neutrino Mass

Neutrinos play a central role in our understanding of the cosmos. From the observation of neutrino oscillation to the understanding of large-scale structure formation, massive neutrinos are a key ingredient to our understanding of the Universe at the smallest and largest scales. Recent experiments have precisely measured neutrino oscillation but fundamental questions about the nature and properties of neutrinos remain: Are neutrinos Majorana particles? What is the absolute mass of neutrinos, and why is it so small? Are there more than three neutrino species? In recent years, experiments measuring neutrinos from nuclear reactors and searching for rare nuclear decays have provided new insight to these questions.

Continue reading… Karsten Heeger (Yale University)

Ben Monreal (Physics) on the prize in Physics, Dan Scherson (Chemistry) on the prize in Chemistry and Abhishek Chakraborty (Department of Cancer Biology) on the prize in Physiology or Medicine. 

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor for their 1995 discovery of 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet.  The star 51 Pegasi is only a little different than the Sun, but 51 Pegasi b is like nothing previously known—it’s a Jupiter-like object, but in fiery hot orbit very close to the star.  Didier and Queloz, using a small telescope with an exquisite spectrograph,

Continue reading… The 2019 Nobel Prizes in Science

Entropy as Disorder: History of a Misconception 

How did entropy morph from a quantifiable entity for finding the peak efficiency of a heat engine, into a synonym for “disorder”, and then into a catch-all name for anything bad?  Henry Adams (grandson of John Quincy Adams) plays a prominent role in this improbable story.

Continue reading… Dan Styer (Oberlin College)