Colloquium
Junior and senior physics majors attend our biweekly colloquium series, held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 pm in Shanahan B460. The talks are open to all students and to the public, and are frequently attended by scientists from the other Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, and others. The series features speakers from a broad range of institutions and fields of physics.
| Oct. 7, 2008 | Jerry Pine, Caltech Studying the Development of Cultured Neural Networks |
Brain neurons can be dissociated from embryos and grown in culture dishes, where they form functionally connected neural networks. The details of this development can be studied in small cultures, where all the connections can be mapped by stimulating individual neurons and observing the responses of all others. A new technology that permits this to be done nondestructively over time ... | |
| Sept. 23, 2008 | Nicola Spaldin, University of California at Santa Barbara How Do We Use Computational Methods to Design New Materials? |
Modern computational methods are proving to be invaluable in the first-principles design of new materials with specific targeted functionalities. After discussing the capabilities and limitations of available computational tools, I will illustrate their utility with a case study on materials that are simultaneously ferromagnetic and ferroelectric. Such “multiferroics” are of current interest because coupling between the order parameters leads both ... | |
| Sept. 9, 2008 | Several HMC Senior Physics Majors, Harvey Mudd College Summer 2008 Off-Campus Research |
HMC senior physics majors Julian Freed-Brown, Alex Hagen, Brandon Horn, Eric Langman, Matthew Lawson, Akash Rakholia, Steve Rosenthal, and Tahir Yusufaly will describe their off-campus research experiences this past summer. Find out how they landed their jobs and what they were like. | |
| April 22, 2008 | Several HMC Professors, Harvey Mudd College Recent Developments in Physics |
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| March 25, 2008 | Steuard Jensen (’98), Joint Sciences Program Extra Dimensions in String Theory |
For many years, string theory has been a leading approach to the vexing problem of quantum gravity and perhaps the only major attempt to formulate a "Theory of Everything." One of its surprising predictions is that our universe should have extra dimensions beyond the familiar three space plus one time. This talk will give a conceptual introduction to the interplay ... | |
| Feb. 19, 2008 | Jun Ye, JILA Quantum Metrology with Precision Light and Ultracold Atoms |
Improvements in spectroscopic resolution have been the driving force behind many scientific and technological breakthroughs over the past century, including the invention of the laser and the realization of ultracold atoms. State-of-the-art lasers can now maintain phase coherence over one second, that is, 1015 optical waves can pass by without losing track of a particular cycle. The recent development of ... | |
| Feb. 12, 2008 | James Higbie, University of California at Berkeley Ultra-Sensitive Atomic Magnetometry: From Fieldable Sensors to High-Resolution Magnetic Microscopy |
Precision measurement of magnetic fields on the centimeter to meter scale has a wide range of fundamental scientific and practical applications, including co-magnetometry for fundamental-particle electric dipole-moment searches, space magnetometry, sensing of biomagnetism, detection of unexploded ordnance, and geophysical exploration. Atomic magnetometers, as high-sensitivity, cryogen-free sensors, are well suited to these applications; development of the next generation of atomic magnetometers, ... | |
| Feb. 5, 2008 | Adam Edwards, Pomona College Particle Physics — Physics at the Petabyte Scale |
Advances in experimental particle physics have often been achieved through colliding particles together at ever higher energies. In recent years however, an alternative way forward has been implemented: precision measurement with particle factories. Achieving “needle in a haystack”" precision out of extremely large amounts of data creates new types of challenges for today’s particle physicists. Computer hardware and software skills ... | |
| Jan. 29, 2008 | Huen Jin Lee, Caltech Using Mechanics to Describe Cell Membrane Structures |
The membranes of a cell are organized in a great variety of shapes and sizes, from the outer cell wall to its internal organelles. While the spatial distribution of these membranous structures have been well characterized (particularly on the micron scale), far less is known about the underlying physical mechanics responsible for even the simplest shapes. A simple physical idea ... | |
| Dec. 4, 2007 | Gordon G. Fullerton, NASA The Early Days of the Space Shuttle Program |
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| Nov. 27, 2007 | Omer Blaes, University of California at Santa Barbara How To Light Up a Black Hole: The Physics of Black Hole Accretion Flows |
Far from being dark, black holes are at the heart of the most energetic and luminous phenomena observed in the universe, from quasars to gamma-ray bursts. In fact, black hole power has actually had a significant ecological impact on the universe, affecting how entire galaxies formed and evolved. Understanding how all this works requires understanding how gravitational binding energy is ... | |
| Nov. 13, 2007 | Ernie Glover, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Ultrafast X-ray Spectroscopy: Probing Dynamics at Fundamental Length and Time Scales |
The non-equilibrium world in which we live is characterized by chemical reactions, phase transitions, and other dynamical processes which, ultimately, are mediated by the ultrafast (<10-12 sec) motion of individual atoms and molecules. Our ability to understand and eventually control how matter evolves at the microscopic level is hampered by an inability to ’see’ material dynamics on such ultrasmall spatial ... | |
| Oct. 30, 2007 | Sean Carroll, Caltech Why Is the Past Different From the Future? |
Over a century ago, Boltzmann and others provided a microscopic understanding for the tendency of entropy to increase. But this understanding relies ultimately on an empirical fact about cosmology: the early universe had a very low entropy. Why was it like that? Cosmologists aspire to provide a dynamical explanation for the observed state of the universe, but have had very ... |
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| Oct. 16, 2007 | Bob McKeown, Caltech Neutrino Masses and Oscillations: Triumphs and Challenges |
The recent progress in establishing the existence of finite neutrino masses and mixing between generations of neutrinos has been remarkable. The combined results from studies of atmospheric neutrinos, solar neutrinos, and reactor antineutrinos paint an intriguing picture that clearly requires modification of the standard electroweak model. These results also provide clear motivation for future experimental studies involving oscillations with nuclear ... | |
| Oct. 2, 2007 | Peter So (’86), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Frontiers in Optical Biomolecular Imaging |
In the post-genomic era, a central challenge of modern biology and medicine is the need to understand how the interactions of protein machines affect the physiology and the pathology of cells and tissues. Optical imaging and spectroscopy afford unprecedented opportunities in studying these dynamical processes in vivo. In this lecture, I will focus on two microscopy technologies. First, high through-put ... |
