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.
| March 25, 2014 | Mark Johnson (’89), D-Wave Observing Entanglement in a Quantum Annealing Processor |
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Quantum Annealing (QA) is an algorithm proposed as one of a potentially powerful set of methods to solve computationally hard problems. It is generally believed that a quantum algorithm must in some way harness entanglement to be able to provide any significant speed-up over classical algorithms. Unfortunately, the absence of microwave signals in the D-Wave processor, a system designed to … |
| March 4, 2014 | Scott Nguyen, Genie Oil & Gas Unlocking Unconventional Resources |
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With the increasing world demand of energy and in particulartransportation fuel, new and alternative sources of energy must be found and developed. Unconventional resources in the form of shale oil could provide a substantial fraction of future energy demand. In this talk, we will discuss results from laboratory studies to understand the physics of and technology being developed to unlock … |
| Feb. 25, 2014 | Ernie Glover, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory An Atomic Scale View of Light-Matter Interactions |
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Light-matter interactions are central to a wide range of scientific and technological disciplines. Though optical interactions have been important to advancing our understanding of atoms, molecules, and materials, the microscopic details of how light manipulates matter are often poorly understood. A material's optical response is complex, determined by coupled manybody interactions that vary on an atomic length scale. While data … |
| Feb. 18, 2014 | Ania Bleszynski-Jayich, University of California at Santa Barbara Quantum assisted sensing with diamond spins |
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Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are atomic-scale spin systems with remarkable quantum properties that persist to room temperature. They are highly sensitive to a wide variety of fields (magnetic, electric, thermal) and are easy to initialize, read-out, and manipulate on the individual spin level; thus they make excellent nanoscale sensors. The NV’s sensitivity is a double-edged sword however; environmental fluctuating … |
| Feb. 4, 2014 | Alex Small, Cal Poly Pomona Theoretical Limits to Superresolution Fluorescence Microscopy |
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Superresolution microscopy techniques enable fluorescence imaging of live cells with subwavelength resolution. These techniques generally fall into two categories, depending on whether fluorescent molecules are controlled deterministically or stochastically. In stochastic techniques, fluorescent molecules blink on and off, with only a small fraction of them emitting light at any given time. Consequently, the molecules form non-overlapping blurs in the image … |
| Jan. 21, 2014 | Leslie Rodgers, Caltech Glimpsing the Compositions of Sub-Neptune-Size Exoplanets |
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Sub-Neptune and super-Earth sized planets are a new planet category. They account for 80% of the planet candidates discovered by Kepler, and 0% of the planets in the Solar System. What is the nature of these sub-Neptune-size planets, how did they form, and why are they so numerous? I will review some highlights from the complement of exotic sub-Neptune-size planets … |
| Nov. 19, 2013 | Dan Steck, University of Oregon Continuous Measurement of the Position of a Single Cold Atom: Towards the Quantum-Classical Transition |
Quantum mechanics is fundamentally a theory of measurement, and recently a paradigm in quantum optics has arisen for describing the continuous measurement of quantum systems. Interesting phenomena can happen in continuously observed systems, due to the interplay of the dynamical evolution and the measurement process. In particular, the evolution of a quantum system under a continuous measurement process is both … |
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| Nov. 5, 2013 | John Gregoire, Caltech Enabling Solar Fuels Technology With High Throughput Experimentation |
The High Throughput Experimentation (HTE) project of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP, http://solarfuelshub.org/) performs accelerated discovery of new earth-abundant photoabsorbers and electrocatalysts. Through collaboration within the DOE solar fuels hub and with the broader research community, the new materials will be utilized in devices that efficiently convert solar energy, water and carbon dioxide into transportation fuels. JCAP-HTE … |
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| Oct. 8, 2013 | Wes Campbell, University of California at Los Angeles One Year Ago Tomorrow (and What Physics Students Should Know About It) |
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The 2013 Nobel Prize in physics is announced today, but for a series of practical reasons, today’s discussion will focus on the work that led to the prize that was awarded to David Wineland and Serge Haroche one year ago tomorrow. That story begins with the demonstration of laser cooling in 1978, which ushered in a new era for atomic … |
| Sept. 24, 2013 | Jodi Christiansen (’85), Cal Poly San Luis Obispo What Every Physicist Should Know About Observational Cosmology |
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Over the past 20 years cosmology has been transformed from a largely theoretical pursuit to a high-precision science with ~1% uncertainties. The theoretical developments of the last century and the observations that led to the discovery of 95% of the “stuff” of our universe weave a fascinating tale that finally answers the fundamental question of how it all came to … |
| Sept. 10, 2013 | Twelve HMC Physics Majors, Harvey Mudd College Physics Majors Describe Summer REU Experiences |
Twelve HMC physics majors will give brief descriptions of their summer research projects and experiences carried out at various institutions across the country:
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| April 23, 2013 | Sarah Nichols, WM Keck Science Center Investigations in Ultrafast Laser Science |
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Many molecular processes take place in regions of space, time, and/or frequency that are difficult to access experimentally. For instance, visible light microscopy is often limited by sample scattering issues, as well as by the lack of natural fluorescence in many molecules of interest. Complex biological and chemical systems inherently have multiple resonances at a variety of frequencies, such that … |
| April 9, 2013 | Nathaniel Gabor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Atomically Thin Photodetectors: the Ideal Semi-Metal vs. the Insurmountable Insulator |
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Graphene, an atomically thin sheet of hexagonally oriented carbon, is a zero-band-gap conductor (semi-metal) that exhibits extraordinary electronic behavior and broadband optical absorption. Hexagonal boron nitride, which shares a similar structure to that of graphene, is a highly insulating electronic material that does not absorb any light in the visible spectrum. By combining graphene and boron nitride into ultrathin vertical … |
| March 26, 2013 | Robert Treuhaft, Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Physics in the Forest: Remote Sensing of Tropical Forests with Interferometric SAR and Lidar |
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When trees are cut down, they release their carbon to the atmosphere in \( \mathrm{CO}_2 \). After fossil fuels, deforestation is the second largest anthropogenic contributor to atmospheric \( \mathrm{CO}_2\). Tropical forests contain about 50% of Earth’s forested biomass, and they account for most deforestation. The degree to which a forest is storing carbon or releasing it to the atmosphere … |
| March 12, 2013 | Frederick H. Streitz ’83, P’13, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Opening Frontiers with Extreme Capability Computing |
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Lawrence Livermore has a long history of fielding some of the world’s largest computers, fueled by our nearly insatiable need for both capacity and capability computing. Each new generation in computing brings with it the ability to perform simulations that were impossible with the earlier computers. I will discuss the development of three applications designed to run on the largest … |
