Events

Phys10 Undergraduate Seminar Series

Agata Branczyk (Perimeter) 

Light moves at nature’s speed limit, and doesn’t degrade for hundreds of kilometres, making it our best medium for sending information over long distances. But to send quantum information, we require quantum light.

Astronomy Seminar Series

Ludovic Van Waerbeke, University of British Columbia

Let's assume dark matter is a particle. The DM theories currently tested, WIMPs-like, either via direct or indirect detection, cover only a tiny range of the allowed DM parameters space, and have not been particularly successful so far. A new DM candidate, the Axion Quark Nugget (AQN), has been proposed by Zhitnitsky in 2003, partly inspired by the quark nuggets (Witten 1984).

Astronomy Seminar Series

Alice Pisani, Princeton University

Modern surveys allow us to access to high quality measurements on large areas in the sky and span large redshift ranges—thus sampling the galaxy distribution in detail also in the emptier regions, voids. Void cosmology is hence becoming an increasingly active sector of galaxy clustering analysis: by measuring void properties, such as the abundance or the density profiles, it is possible to constrain cosmological parameters.

Louis Deslauriers

Director of Science Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences;
Senior Preceptor in Physics
Department of Physics, Harvard University

8:30 -- coffee and light refreshments

9:00 - 10:00

Astronomy Seminar Series

Nienke van der Marel, University of British Columbia

Successful exoplanet surveys in the last decade have revealed that planets are ubiquitous throughout the Milky Way, and show a large diversity in mass, location and composition. At the same time, new facilities such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and optical/infrared facilities including Gemini/GPI and VLT/SPHERE have provided us with sharper images than ever before of protoplanetary disks around young stars, the birth cradles of planets.

Phys10 Undergraduate Seminar Series

Professor Wei Tsen (UW Chemistry/IQC) 

The discovery of graphene and other two-dimensional (2D) materials has led to a new vanguard in condensed matter physics. Not only does dimensionality allow for robust control of the electronic properties of layered materials, novel heterostructures with no traditional analog can further be created by interfacing different 2D species. In this talk, I will give an overview of the 2D materials field, discuss a few recent breakthroughs, and present some of our own results on 2D magnetic systems.

Naman Gupta, Masters student with Prof. David Hawthorn

Introduction to the physics of high-Tc superconductivity

Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 in elemental metals by K. Onnes. Until the 1980s, physicists believed that the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) theory — which describes most of the physics of conventional superconductivity — barred superconductivity at temperatures greater than 30 K. In 1986, physicists G. Bednorz and A.

Astronomy Seminar Series

Jo Dunkley, Princeton University

There is currently a tension between various measurements of the expansion rate of the universe. I will give a recap of this issue, and talk about how we use the Cosmic Microwave Background, our most distant observation, to infer the local expansion rate of space. I will explain what assumptions we make about the cosmological model in doing so, and how we might modify this model to bring different measurements of the expansion rate better in line.

Astronomy Seminar Series

Arnaud De-Mattia, CEA Saclay

In this talk I will present the clustering analysis of the ELG (Emission Line Galaxy) sample from the eBOSS (extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) program of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and review the other clustering analyses of the eBOSS program, dedicated to Luminous Red Galaxies and Quasars. I will discuss theoretical, observational and analysis systematics, how they were estimated and mitigated, focusing on the improvements over the last release of the BOSS program in 2016.

Phys10 Undergraduate Seminar Series

Alan Jamison, Department of Physics & Astronomy and IQC

I will begin by describing how we use a collection of high power lasers to cool a hot atomic beam from 1000K to 1nK. At such ultracold temperatures all thermal motion has ceased, making quantum mechanical effects dominate. One example of this behavior is the Bose-Einstein condensation transition, which sees thousands or even millions of atoms occupy the same quantum state, bringing quantum behavior to relatively large scales where it may be directly observed.