Browsing School of Physics Colloquia Series by Title
Now showing items 1-20 of 103
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The American Physical Society Report on the Status of LGBT People in Physics
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-04-16)In this talk, I’ll discuss climatic issues faced by LGBT people in Physics, informed by findings of the recent American Physical Society report on the status of LGBT people in Physics. This report was prepared for the APS ... -
Arch and scaffold: Hilbert space and transformation theory
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-04-02)In early 1927, Paul Dirac and Pascual Jordan, independently of one another, published their versions of a general formalism tying the various forms of the new quantum theory together and giving the theory’s statistical ... -
The Astrophysics of Black Hole Spin
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-04-22)In addition to providing vital clues as to the formation and evolution of black holes, the spin of black holes may be an important energy source in the Universe. Over the past couple of years, tremendous progress has been ... -
Autonomous Motility in Soft Active Matter
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-04-06)The laws of equilibrium statistical mechanics impose severe constraints on the properties of conventional materials assembled from inanimate building blocks. Consequently, such materials cannot exhibit spontaneous motion ... -
The Beginning of the Quantum Era
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-10-25)Shifman reviews the growth of quantum physics from its inception in the beginning of the 20th century to its maturity 50 years later. His narrative includes dramatic stories of the quantum pioneers between two wars. Caught ... -
The Biggest Little Molecules in Nature
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011-12-07)This colloquium will discuss recent theoretical predictions and experimental confirmation of two unusual classes of ultra-long-range molecules. One class involves a highly-excited Rydberg electron that manages to bind a ... -
Building a Cell from the Bottom Up
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-11-09)Biology utilizes energy to organize itself from the nanoscale to the macroscopic scale. We seek to determine the universal principles of organization from the molecular scale that give rise to architecture on the cellular ... -
Cell Mechanics: The Active Polymer Networks Underlying Force Transmission in Living Cells
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-04-16)Many different types of biological cells have the capability of sensing and generating mechanical forces. These biophysical properties of cells are utilized for many different aspects of cell physiology, including cell ... -
Collapse of the Collapse: Physicists Return to Reality
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-10-18)Recent developments[1] have shown that the collapse hypothesis is self-inconsistent and is no longer a viable theory. (The collapse hypothesis in quantum mechanics is that the state of a system is collapsed by a measurement, ... -
Compact Penning Traps for Quantum Science with Cold Atomic Ions
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-04-11)Penning ion traps are useful experimental platforms for quantum simulation, mass spectrometry, precision metrology, and molecular ion spectroscopy. The GTRI Quantum Systems Division (QSD) has developed a compact, ... -
Computation with Quanta
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-02-11)A quantum processor, using quantum states of light and matter, holds the promise of performing calculations and simulations that are not practical by a classical processor. Many of the key components for a quantum processor ... -
Consider the Icicle
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-02-04)Icicles are harmless and picturesque winter phenomena, at least in cold climates. The shape of an icicle emerges from a subtle feedback between ice formation, which is controlled by the release of latent heat, and the flow ... -
Cosmic Information Theory and Analysis: IT from BIT, from BITs in IT
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011-11-30)We consider the Universe to be fundamentally quantum and statistical, the many-paths/many-worlds story. This lecture uses Cosmic Information Theory and Analysis, CITA, as a unifying theme to explore the vast sweep of our ... -
Course Reform MIT Style: Student Evaluations vs. Scientific Evidence
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-04-03)The evaluation of most course reforms typically rests heavily on teacher and student evaluations; I’ll argue that this is unwise. In contrast, I’ll discuss course reform MIT style: select objectives, adopt metrics, experiment, ... -
Crackdown on Academic Collaboration with China Harms American Science
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-11-01)Academic collaboration with China was once encouraged by the US government and universities. As tension between the two countries rises rapidly, those who did, especially scientists of Chinese descent, are under heightened ... -
The crumpled state: crumpling dynamics and the evolution of damage networks
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-12-04)The simple process of crumpling a sheet of paper with our hands results in a complex network of interconnected permanent creases of many sizes and orientations. Sheet preferentially bends along these creases, introducing ... -
A Discovery! The Higgs? Why it is important. How it was done
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-03-04)The ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider with its sister experiment CMS reported a discovery last summer of a new boson which is consistent with the Standard Model Higgs boson. The Higgs particle has been searched ... -
Effective field theory and ultracold atoms
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-02-06)The development of the technology for trapping atoms in the vacuum and cooling them to ultralow temperatures has opened up the exciting new field of cold atom physics. This field provides a new domain of applications for ... -
Exoplanets in HD
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-03-30)Exoplanet surveys have revealed an amazing diversity of planets orbiting other stars in the last two decades. Studying the atmospheres of representative exoplanets is the key next step in leveraging these detections to ... -
Exploring Quantum Electronic Transport in Flatland
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-04-10)Over the past decade, the physics of low dimensional electronic systems has been revolutionized by the discovery of materials with very unusual electronic properties where the behavior of the electrons is governed by the ...