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.
| 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 ... | |
| Sept. 18, 2007 | Dwight L. Whitaker, Pomona College Captivating and Chilling: An All-Optical Method for Making Bose-Einstein Condensates |
We have developed a system to create Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in a time varying optical dipole trap produced by a single focused CO2 laser. Our system can cool up to a million atoms to quantum degeneracy in any hyperfine states. We have also found that our trap provides a temperature stability and precision that is better than any "conventional" BEC ... | |
| Sept. 11, 2007 | Six HMC Students, Harvey Mudd College Off-Campus Research in the Summer of 2007 |
Sam Eisenberg, Max Gibiansky, David Coats, Stephen Rosenthal, Will Tipton, and Meredith Rawls will describe how they landed their summer research positions and what they were like. | |
| April 24, 2007 | Eric E. Fullerton, University of California at San Diego Characterizing Magnetic Materials on the Nano-Scale Using Synchrotron X-Rays |
Magnetic materials and devices have played a major role in science and technology for the last half century. Hard disk drives dominate information storage and magnetic random access memory (MRAM) is emerging in the memory market. Present magnetic devices are complex metal hetero-structures that combine many layers and state-of-the-art lithography. A key component for continued development of such nano-technologies is ... | |
| April 17, 2007 | Ashley Stroupe, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Robotic Planetary Science: the Mars Exploration Rovers and Beyond |
One of the primary tasks of the Jet Propulsion Lab is robotic planetary science. This talk will discuss the current state of the art in planetary rovers, the Mars Exploration Rovers, focusing in particular on their autonomous capabilities. There will also be details of some of the scientific results of the MER mission. Several limitations are still inherent in the ... | |
| April 3, 2007 | Roger Falcone, University of California at Berkeley Watching Atoms Move With Ultrafast X-Rays |
I will discuss experiments which study the dynamics of atoms in materials. This work utilizes fast x-ray pulses to probe the motion of atoms that have been excited by fast laser pulses. I will also discuss new synchrotron-based sources of x-rays, plans for a new generation of x-ray free-electron lasers, and opportunities for new science. | |
| March 20, 2007 | David Hafemeister, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Physics of Sustainability |
Sustainability movement will be defined and described. The physics part of sustainability is driven by energy use and environmental impacts. Recent data on energy and climate change will be displayed. This will be followed by back-of-the-envelope calculations, which prove the following:
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