Physics and Astronomy Colloquia

Physics and Astronomy Colloquia take place most Fridays throughout the term from 3:30-4:30 pm in Wilder 104 unless otherwise noted. Colloquia are currently also available on Zoom. Department tea/coffee is 3:00 to 3:30 in Wilder 103 and discussion will follow the seminar at 4:45. Please check back frequently for updates to the schedule. Upcoming colloquia are also listed in the events section of the News and Events page.  Colloquia prior to June 2017 are on the Colloquium Archives page.

Fall 2023

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

9/22/2023

Salvatore Vitale

MIT Gravitational-wave astrophysics, today and tomorrow  [Video]
9/29/2023 Erin Kara MIT What happens when you throw something into a black hole? Probing the causal connection between inflow and outflow in accreting black holes.   [Video]
10/6/2023 Paul Nation IBM Quantum Mitigating Measurement Errors on Quantum Computers   [Video]
10/20/2023 Elisabeth Newton Dartmouth College Observing the Evolution of Stars and Planets   [Video]
10/27/2023 Victor Acosta University of New Mexico Precision measurement and spectroscopy with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers in diamond   [Video]
11/3/2023 Annika Peter Ohio State University Dark Matter Physics with Tiny Galaxies   [Video]

Spring 2023

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

3/31/2023

Yi-Hsin Liu

Dartmouth College Magnetic Explosions in Space   [Video]
4/14/2023 Peter Maurer University of Chicago Interfacing Biomolecules with Coherent Quantum Sensors
4/21/2023 Gregory Fiete Northeastern University New Perspectives from Out-of-equilibrium Quantum Materials   [Video]
5/5/2023 Shany Danieli Princeton University Low mass galaxies and their dark matter halos: lessons learned from satellite galaxies and the dynamics of globular clusters   [Video]
5/12/2023 Joseph Maciejko University of Alberta Hyperbolic quantum matter   [Video]
5/19/2023 Graduate Student Forum Dartmouth College Various Topics
5/26/2023 Ryan Hickox Dartmouth College The extremes of galaxy and black hole formation   [Video]

Winter 2023

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

1/6/2023

David Kaiser

MIT Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter Candidates   [Video]
1/20/2023

Katelin Schutz

McGill University

Revealing hidden particles and forces with gravitational clues   [Video]
1/27/23 Sasha Philippov University of Maryland Fireworks produced by extreme plasmas near neutron stars and black holes   [Video]
2/3/2023

Dr. Alex Lupsasca

Vanderbilt University

The Black Hole Photon Ring   [Video]
2/10/2023

Jonathan Friedman

Amherst College When a clock (transition) is good for more than telling time   [Video]
2/17/2023

Victor Galitski

University of Maryland

Many-Body Quantum Chaos and Emergence of Statistical Mechanics   [Video]

2/24/2023

Eric Cornell

University of Colorado

Microhertz spectroscopy, teraelectronvolt physics, and the origin of matter: A measurement of the electron's electric dipole moment.   [Video]

Fall 2022

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

9/16/2022 Gerald A. Goldin Rutgers University Quantum Kinematics, the Prediction of Anyons, and Some Wider Implications   [Video]
9/23/2022 Mattias Fitzpatrick Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College Quantum Engineering with Superconducting Circuits  [Video]
9/30/2022 Lina Necib MIT Tracing Dark Matter with Stars around the Milky Way   [Video]
10/7/2022

Maria Kamenetska

Boston University

Towards molecular electronics with single molecule-metal junctions   [Video]

11/4/2022

Scott C. Noble

NASA GSFC

Lighting Up Inspiraling Binary Black Hole Systems   [Video]

11/11/2022

Andrew Vanderburg

MIT

A Song of Ice and Fire: the Fate of Planetary Systems After Stellar Death   [Video]

Spring 2022

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

4/15/2022 Rodolfo Montez Chandra X-Ray Center,  Smithsonian Astrophysical Obs, Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics X-ray Emission from the recurrent nova RS Oph  (Video)

4/21/2022

Fulvio Zonca

Center for Nonlinear Plasma Science and C.R. ENEA Frascati

Alfvénic Fluctuations and Alpha Particle Transport in Burning Plasmas   (Video)

4/29/2022 Brooke Russell Berkeley Lab Examining Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry with DUNE   (Video)
5/6/2022 Daniel Harlow MIT Symmetry in Quantum Gravity   (Video)
5/13/2022 Olga Goulko UMass Boston The Grasshopper Problem   (Video)
5/20/2022

Susanne Yelin

UConn Dense Arrays: A Novel Quantum Tool   (Video)
5/27/2022 Matthew Zettergren ERAU & Dartmouth College Local-Scale Modeling of Terrestrial Ionosphere Coupling to the Atmosphere and Magnetosphere

Fall 2021

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

9/17/2021

Vinothan N. Manoharan

Harvard

The Physics of Virus Self-Assembly (Video)

9/24/2021

Phiala Shanahan

MIT

Proton and Nuclear Structure from the Standard Model (Video)

10/1/2021

Geoffroy Hautier

Dartmouth Thayer School of Engineering

Using quantum mechanics based computations (DFT) to search for new materials (Video)

10/8/2021

Julián B. Muñoz

Harvard

Cosmic Dawn: The Next Frontier in Cosmology (Video)

10/15/2021

Ryan Sweeney

MIT

Progress Towards Net Fusion Energy in SPARC (Video)

10/22/2021

Jillian Bellovary

Research Asssociate / AMNH
Assistant Professor / CUNY-QCC

Seeking Massive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies (Video)

10/29/2021

Charles Brown

University of California, Berkeley

Probe of Band Structure Singularities with a Lattice-Trapped Quantum Gas (Video)

11/12/2021

Nicole Yunger Halpern

NIST
QuICS
University of Maryland

Quantum Steampunk: Quantum Information Meets Thermodynamics (Video)

Spring 2021 Colloquia

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

4/2/2021

Kristina Lynch

Dartmouth College

Auroral Reconstruction CubeSwarm – ARCS: A Heliophysics Mission Concept for Decoding the Aurora

4/9/2021

Cora Dvorkin

Harvard University
 

Discovering New Physics with Cosmological Data Sets

4/16/2021

Luca Amendola

University of Heidelberg (Germany)

Cosmology Without Assuming a Cosmology

4/23/2021

Alán Aspuru-Guzik

U of Toronto

What to do with a Near Term Quantum Computer?
  [Video]

4/30/2021

Lisa Kaltenegger

Carl Sagen Institute at Cornell

How to Find Life on Exoplanets  
[Video]

5/7/2021

Norman Yao

UC Berkeley

Emergent hydrodynamics in a strongly interacting dipolar spin ensemble  
[Video]

5/14/2021

David Alexander

Durham University

Why is color special? Identifying fundamental differences between red and blue quasars  [Video]

Winter 2021 Colloquia

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

1/15/2021

Jenny Bergner

University of Chicago

The Volatile Reservoir of Planet-Forming Disks   (Video)

1/22/2021

Mustafa Amin

Rice University
 

Smashing Solitons of Cosmology   (Video)

1/29/21

Gourab Ghoshal

University of Rochester

A physics Approach to Study Urban Systems  (Video) 

2/5/2021

Sid Redner

Santa Fe Institute

Is Basketball Scoring Just a Random Walk? (Video)

2/19/2021

Caleb Scharf

Columbia University

As Worlds Turn  (Video)

3/5/2021

Catherine Kealhofer

Williams College

Generating and Controlling Ultrafast Electron Pulses for Time-Resolved Electron Diffraction   (Video)

Fall 2020 Colloquia

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

9/18/2020

Keith Baker

Yale University

Quantum Entanglement in High Energy Physics at CERN's Large Hadron Collider   (Video)

10/23/2020

Jerry Goldstein

SWRI

Rediscovery of the Plasmasphere: History and Future of Plasmasphere Research

10/30/2020

Vivienne Baldassare

Washington State University

Searching for Supermassive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies   (Video)

11/6/2020

Geoff Crew

MIT Haystack Observatory

About that First Look at a Black Hole   (Video)

11/13/2020 Ketevi Adikle Assamagan Brookhaven National Lab Using the Higgs Boson to Search for Dark Sector Particles  (Video)

Spring 2020 Colloquia

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

4/3/2020

James D. Whitfield

Dartmouth College

Quantum Technology: Here and Now   (Video)

4/17/2020

Roger Melko

Perimeter Institute

Machine Learning the Quantum Many-Body Problem   (Video)

5/8/2020

Clara Sousa-Silva

MIT EAPS

Finding an Alien Biosphere with Computational Chemistry   (Video)

5/15/2020

Ana Maria Rey

JILA, University of Colorado Boulder

Observation of Dynamical Phase Transitions in Cold Atomic Gases   (Video)

5/22/2020

Daryl Haggard

McGill University

New Probes of Black Hole Variability   (Video)

5/29/2020

Marissa Giustina

Google LLC

Building Google’s Quantum Computer   (Video)

Winter 2020 Colloquia

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

1/10/2020

Brian Swingle

University of Maryland

Entangled Butterflies: Chaos in Complex Quantum Systems    (Video)

1/17/2020

Alexander Petroff

Clark University

Collective Dynamics of Fast Swimming Bacteria Near a Surface   (Video)

1/24/2020

Kerstin Perez

MIT

Scanning the Sky for Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter   (Video -- we unfortunately had technical issues this day so the slides are not visible)

1/31/2020

Claudio Chamon

Boston University

Path to Building Quantum Spin Liquids and Topological Qubits Within Existing Quantum Hardware   (Video)

2/7/2020

James Buckley

Washington University in St. Louis

Hedging One's Bets on Dark Matter    (Video)

2/21/2020

Rick Fienberg

American Astronomical Society

A Scientist's Guide to Interacting with the Media   (Video)

2/28/2020

John (Brad) Marston

Brown University

El Niño as a Topological Insulator: A Surprising Connection Between Climate, and Quantum, Physics   (Video)

3/6/2020

Sheperd Doeleman

Center for Astrophysics
Harvard & Smithsonian

Imaging a Black Hole with the Event Horizon Telescope

Fall 2019 Colloquia

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

9/20/2019

Kenneth Brown

Duke University

How to Construct a Quantum Computer 

9/27/2019

Kimmy Wu

University of Chicago

Testing Inflation with the BICEP/Keck Array and South Pole Telescope  (Video)

10/4/2019

Fiona Harrison

Caltech

Science Highlights from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR): Bringing the High Energy Universe into Focus  (Video)

10/11/2019

Martin Greenwald

MIT

SPARC and the High-Field Path to Fusion Energy  (Video)

10/18/2019

Anson Hook

University of Maryland

The Theory and Search for Axions  (Video)

10/25/2019

Paola Cappellaro

MIT

How to Avoid HEATED Arguments Among Your Spins  (Video)

11/1/2019

Erich Osterberg

Dartmouth College

Hockey Sticks are Everywhere! The Recent Emergence of Climate Change in Greenland and New England  (Video)

11/8/2019

William Coish

McGill University

Topological Bound States and Topological Quantum Dynamics  (Video)

11/15/2019

Vladan Vuletic

MIT

Spin Squeezing in Optical-Clock Atoms  (Video)

Spring 2019 Colloquia

 

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

3/29/19

Chandrasekhar Ramanathan

Dartmouth College

Quantum Simulation and Sensing with Magnetic Resonance (Video)

4/5/19

David Hanneke

Amherst College

Driving Forbidden Vibrational Overtones in Molecular Ions (Video)

4/12/19

Anatoly Spitkovsky

Princeton University

Pulsar Magnetosphere: The Incredible Machine (Video)

4/19/19

Bruce Allen

AEI

The Direct Observation of Gravitational Waves (Video)

4/26/19

Tami Pereg-Barnea

McGill University

Topological States of Matter - Now What? (Video)

5/3/19

Marcel Agüeros

Columbia University

The Evolution of Cool Dwarf Spin Rate: Data, Models, and Tensions (Video)

5/10/19

Clayton Simien

Daneesh Simien

Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham

Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham

Laser Spectroscopy and Cooling: Tools to Probe Fundamental Physics      (Video of both talks)

Next Generation Smart Materials: Understanding the Role of Homogeneous Nanomaterials For Materials Processing

5/17/19

Raymond Brock

Michigan State University

That Spin 0 Boson Changes Everything: The Future of the Energy Frontier in Particle Physics  (Video)

5/24/19

Marc Swisdak

University of Maryland

Magnetic Reconnection and the Explosive Release of Plasma Energy (Video)

Winter 2019 Colloquia

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

1/4/19

Lauranne Lanz

Dartmouth College

Black Hole Feedback in Action? Investigating the Role of Supermassive Black Holes in Galaxy Evolution (Video)

1/18/19

Peter Johnson

Zapata Computing

Algorithmically Extending the Capabilities of Near-Term Quantum Computers (Video)

1/25/19

Wen Li

Boston University

Origin of Diffuse Aurora at Earth and Jupiter (Video not available)

2/1/19

Grant Tremblay

Harvard & Smithsonian

Galaxy-Scale Fountains with Black Hole Pumps (Video)

2/8/19

Chen-Yu Liu

Indiana University

Unresolved Problems in Neutron Decay (Video)

2/15/19

Sasha Tchekhovskoy

Northwestern University

Disks, Jets, and Other Black Hole-Powered Transients (Video)

Fall 2018 Colloquia

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

9/14/18

Kevin Wright 

Dartmouth College

Shining a Light on the Mysterious World of Quantum Materials (Video)

9/21/18

Anne Gelb

Dartmouth College

High Order Imaging Techniques for Synethetic Aperture Radar (Video)

9/28/18

Jim Drake

University of Maryland

Magnetic Reconnection and Particle Acceleration in Space and Astrophysical Systems (Video)

10/5/18

Carlos Meriles

CUNY City College of New York

Dynamic Nuclear Polarization Via Nitrogen-Vacancy in Diamond: Physics and Applications (Video)

10/12/18

Benjamin Chandran

University of New Hampshire

The Parker Solar Probe and Origin of the Solar Wind (Video)

10/26/18

Jim Binkoski

Dartmouth College

Is Spacetime a "Structural Quality of the Field"? (Video)

11/2/18

David Grinspoon

Dartmouth College

Venus Missions: Past, Present, Planned and Pretend (Video)

Spring 2018 Colloquia

Date 

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

3/30/18

Michael Andrews 

WadeandWendy.ai

A Physics Education and Beyond (Video)

4/6/18

Raffi Budakian

University of Waterloo

Nanometer-Scale Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy

4/13/18

Chih-Chun Chien

University of California, Merced

Quantum Transport in Ultracold Atoms (Video)

4/20/18

Sally Dawson

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Precision Measurements for the LHC (Video)

4/27/18

Jure Zupan

University of Cincinnati

News From Particle Physics Precision Frontier (Video)

5/4/18

Nuno Loureiro

MIT

New Insights Into Plasma Turbulence (Video)

5/11/18

Valerio Faraoni

Bishop's University

Modifying Gravity to Explain the Cosmic Acceleration (Video)

5/18/18

Anne White 

MIT

Understanding Cold-Pulse Dynamics in Tokamak Plasmas Using Local Turbulent Transport Models (Video)

 

5/25/18

Masahiro Morii 

Harvard University

Experimental Searches for Dark Matter (Video)

Winter 2018 Colloquia

Date

Speaker

Affiliation

Topic

1/5/18

Joshua Burger

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Hunting for Dark Matter (Video)

1/12/18

Richard Kremer

Dartmouth College

Dartmouth and its Shattuck Observatory: Science and Identity at a 'Small College' From 1848 to 2018 (Video)

1/19/18

James Lowenthal

Smith College

How Astronomers Are Saving the World and the Sky (Video)

1/26/18

Alexander Smith

Dartmouth College

Quantizing Time (Video)

2/2/18

Elisabeth Newton

MIT

The Astrophysics of the Smallest Stars and Their Planets (Video)

2/5/18

Joseph Rodriguez

Harvard University

Transiting Planets and Eclipsing Disks as a Guide for Planet Formation (Video)

2/9/18

Kristin McQuinn

University of Texas at Austin

The Low-Mass Galaxy Frontier

2/12/18

Abigail Vieregg

University of Chicago

Discovering the Highest Energy Neutrinos Using Radio Detection Techniques

2/16/18

Jedidah Isler

Vanderbilt University

Blazar Astrophysics in the 2020s: Building the Case Now for the Observations of the Future

2/23/18

Jason Dexter

MPE Garching

Resolving Black Holes in Space and Time

3/9/18

Mark Hertzberg

Tufts University

The Accelerating Universe and Relativity (Video)

 

Fall Term

Fall 2017 Colloquia

Date

Speaker

Affiliation

Topic

9/15/17

Ken Van Tilberg

IAS

Tabletop Searches for Ultralight Dark Matter (Video)

9/22/17

Roberto Onofrio

Dartmouth, University of Padua

Higgs, Weak Interactions and Gravitation (Video)

9/29/17

Douglas Finkbeiner

Harvard

The Search for WIMP Dark Matter: New Approaches to Stubborn Problems (Video)

10/6/17

Matthew Schwartz

Harvard

Machine Learning and the Large Hadron Collider (Video)

10/13/17

Robyn Millan

Dartmouth

Dynamics of Radiation Belt Electrons and the BARREL Experiment  (Video)

10/20/17

Subir Sachdev

Harvard

Quantum Matter Without Quasiparticles: Strange Metals and Black Holes  (Video)

10/27/17

Moira Gresham

Whitman College

Beyond the WIMP Dark Matter Paradigm: Asymmetric Dark Matter Nuclei  (Video)

11/3/17

Joseph Formaggio

MIT

Weighing Neutrinos (Video)

11/10/17

Nuno Loureiro

MIT/PSFC

New Insights Into Plasma Turbulence (Cancelled)

11/17/17

Jun Ye

Univ. of Colorado, JILA, NIST

Atomic Clock Based on Quantum Matter