Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. Polaritronics MURI Kick-Off Meeting (September 21, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44641 44641-9934464@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, September 21, 2017 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Physics Workshops & Conferences

Please see website for details: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/polaritronics/event/kickoff-meeting/

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Meeting Fri, 15 Sep 2017 17:08:35 -0400 2017-09-21T12:00:00-04:00 2017-09-21T15:00:00-04:00 West Hall Physics Workshops & Conferences Meeting West Hall
CGIS Open House! (September 21, 2017 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/43512 43512-9798613@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, September 21, 2017 2:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for Global and Intercultural Study

CGIS would like to invite you to our open house that will take place in our new office in Weiser Hall! Come by and check out student submitted photos, meet our advisors, and most importantly EAT! There will be plenty of food, free t-shirts, and opportunities to learn about studying abroad!

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Workshop / Seminar Sun, 03 Sep 2017 17:12:09 -0400 2017-09-21T14:00:00-04:00 2017-09-21T16:00:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for Global and Intercultural Study Workshop / Seminar Weiser Hall
Mapping in the Enlightenment: Science, Innovation, and the Public Sphere (September 22, 2017 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/40535 40535-9675038@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 22, 2017 10:00am
Location: William Clements Library
Organized By: William L. Clements Library

This exhibit uses examples from the Clements Library collection to tell the story of creating, distributing, and using maps during the long 18th century. Enlightenment thinking stimulated the effort to make more accurate maps, encouraged the growth of map collecting and map use by men and women in all social classes, and expanded the role of maps in administration and decision-making throughout Europe and her overseas colonies.

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Exhibition Thu, 20 Apr 2017 09:21:37 -0400 2017-09-22T10:00:00-04:00 2017-09-22T16:00:00-04:00 William Clements Library William L. Clements Library Exhibition Cassini Planisphere
Life After Grad School Seminar | Atypical Adventures in Astrophysics: Airplanes, Airports, and a School (September 22, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44788 44788-9980559@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 22, 2017 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Deano Smith completed his Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Michigan in 2000, studying dark matter distributions with Professor Gary Bernstein. His dissertation, “Determining Field Galaxy Halo Masses Via the Weak Gravitational Lensing Effect,” was based upon observations made using the BTC, or “Big Throughput Camera,” that he worked on developing, testing, and putting into service as part of his graduate program. The camera, which was the largest high-throughput astronomical camera at the time, was used on the 4-meter Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, so he got some travel time and was able to enjoy the southern skies rather extensively. He was fortunate in the breadth of his astronomy experience, having also worked with Joel Bregman and Mario Mateo on different research projects, and having received advice, tutelage, and fun times at conferences with numerous faculty including Fred Adams, Pat Seitzer, and Gus Evrard. Since departing U of M with a two-body-academic problem, he has taught high school science, taught people to fly airplanes, operated a small airport, and held a tenure-track Research Scientist position in the Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratories. He has now returned to teaching high school science at Greenhills School in Ann Arbor.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 22 Sep 2017 18:16:36 -0400 2017-09-22T12:00:00-04:00 2017-09-22T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Constraining New Physics with Lepton Flavor Violating Meson Decays (September 25, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44764 44764-9971937@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, September 25, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Radiative and non-radiative lepton flavor violating (LFV) decays M --> (gamma) + l-lbar pair of meson states M with different quantum numbers can be used to put constraints on the Wilson coefficients of effective operators describing LFV interactions at low energy scales. The restricted kinematics of the two-body meson decays allows for the selection of operators with particular quantum numbers, significantly reducing the reliance on the single operator dominance assumption that is prevalent in constraining parameters of the effective LFV Lagrangian. Studies of radiative lepton flavor violating M --> (gamma) + l-lbar pair decays provide complementary access to those effective operators, but more importantly, they can provide access to operators that cannot be directly probed via two-body decays.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 25 Sep 2017 18:16:31 -0400 2017-09-25T16:00:00-04:00 2017-09-25T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Superconductivity Near a Quantum Critical Point (September 26, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42184 42184-9584872@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, September 26, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

I discuss the interplay between non-Fermi liquid behaviour and superconductivity near a quantum-critical point (QCP) in a metal. It was thought by many researchers that in D=2, non-Fermi liquid behaviour near a QCP extends to energies well above superconducting Tc, and that superconductivity involves non Fermi-liquid quasiparticles and emerges due to peculiar interplay between strong attraction and strong pair-breaking effects from self-energy. I argue that this is not necessary always the case. I show that in a situation, when critical bosons are slow compared to electrons, fermionic self-energy plays little role for superconductivity in 2D, despite that it is strong and destroys fermionic coherence. I discuss the special role of the “first Matsubara frequency” in this regard. I present explicit results for Tc for the set of models with frequency dependent effective interaction, including the strong coupling limit of electron phonon interaction.


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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 26 Sep 2017 18:16:33 -0400 2017-09-26T16:00:00-04:00 2017-09-26T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET BROWN BAG | Topics in Axion Cosmology (September 27, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44957 44957-10015370@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, September 27, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

(Which topics? The interesting ones!) Light pseudo-Goldstone bosons arise in many compelling models of particle physics and string theory. These particles can modify cosmology in interesting, surprising, and testable ways. In this talk I will discuss three topics. First I’ll argue that the dynamics of an axion field during inflation can give rise to the matter / antimatter asymmetry of the universe via the production of helical magnetic fields (which persist today and might be detectable!). Second, I’ll discuss what goes wrong when you try to implement the same idea with chiral gravitational waves instead of magnetic fields. Finally, I’ll talk about new phenomena that arise in multi-axion models, such as the recent proposed `clockwork’ axion, that have a large hierarchy between the scale of PQ-breaking and the axion decay constant.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 22 Sep 2017 16:32:29 -0400 2017-09-27T12:00:00-04:00 2017-09-27T13:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | Fast Radio Bursts - Nature's Latest Cosmic Mystery (September 27, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42276 42276-9593310@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, September 27, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics


Abstract: Fast Radio Bursts are millisecond-duration pulses of unknown origin that were discovered by pulsar astronomers in 2007. A decade on from the discovery, with only 20 further bursts currently known, fast radio bursts remain enigmatic sources which parallel the early days of gamma-ray burst astronomy in the early 1970s. I will tell the story of their discovery, summarize what we know about them so far, describe the science opportunities these bursts present, and make predictions for what we will learn in the next decade.

Bio sketch: Duncan Lorimer got his PhD in 1994 for his contributions to Pulsar Astronomy from the University of Manchester in the UK working under the supervision of Prof. Andrew Lyne, Dick Manchester and Matthew Bailes. Since then he has held positions at the University of Manchester (Lecturer; 1994-5); the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy (Postdoctoral Fellow; 1995-8); Cornell University (Postdoctoral Fellow; 1998-2001); University of Manchester (Royal Society Research Fellow; 2001-6) and West Virginia University (Faculty; 2006-present). He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society since 1994. While at West Virginia University, he has received a Cottrell Scholar Award (2008-present) from the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement and has received both his College and University’s recognition for excellence in teaching (2009, 2010). He is currently Associate Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Among his notable research achievements are his contributions to our understanding of the population of pulsars and the discovery of Fast Radio Bursts which he will describe in this talk.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 27 Sep 2017 18:16:31 -0400 2017-09-27T16:00:00-04:00 2017-09-27T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Mapping in the Enlightenment: Science, Innovation, and the Public Sphere (September 29, 2017 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/40535 40535-9675039@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 29, 2017 10:00am
Location: William Clements Library
Organized By: William L. Clements Library

This exhibit uses examples from the Clements Library collection to tell the story of creating, distributing, and using maps during the long 18th century. Enlightenment thinking stimulated the effort to make more accurate maps, encouraged the growth of map collecting and map use by men and women in all social classes, and expanded the role of maps in administration and decision-making throughout Europe and her overseas colonies.

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Exhibition Thu, 20 Apr 2017 09:21:37 -0400 2017-09-29T10:00:00-04:00 2017-09-29T16:00:00-04:00 William Clements Library William L. Clements Library Exhibition Cassini Planisphere
Special Cosmology Seminar | Integrated Approach to Cosmology (September 29, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44880 44880-10000731@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 29, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: Department of Physics

Recent progress in observational cosmology and the establishment of ΛCDM have relied on the combination of different cosmological probes. These probes are not independent, since they all measure the same physical fields. The resulting cross-correlations allow for a robust test of the cosmological model through the consistency of different physical tracers and for the identification of systematics. Integrated analyses taking into account both the auto- as well as the cross-correlations between cosmological probes therefore present a promising analysis method for both current as well as future data.

In this talk, I will present an integrated analysis of CMB temperature anisotropies, CMB lensing, galaxy clustering and weak lensing as well as background probes. I will describe the cosmological probe combination framework, the obtained results and illustrate how this analysis has provided a confirmation of ΛCDM through the consistency of different probes. Furthermore, I will discuss possible tensions between the derived constraints on cosmological parameters and existing ones.

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 21 Sep 2017 11:01:52 -0400 2017-09-29T12:00:00-04:00 2017-09-29T13:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
HET Seminar | Gravitational Radiation from Classical QCD (September 29, 2017 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44543 44543-9923136@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 29, 2017 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

TBA

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 25 Sep 2017 10:07:55 -0400 2017-09-29T15:00:00-04:00 2017-09-29T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
NERS Colloquium: : Rami A. Kishek, IREAP, Univ of Maryland (September 29, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45166 45166-10104526@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 29, 2017 4:00pm
Location: Cooley Building
Organized By: Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences

Title: Recent Advances in Theory of Multipactor Discharges

Abstract: Multipactor is an electron avalanche occurring when stray electrons are trapped and accelerated by radiofrequency (rf) waves in a vacuum, hitting walls and ejecting other electrons by secondary electron emission (SEE). The rapid multiplication in the number of electrons ultimately creates noise, heat and possibly damage in a wide range of environments from space communication systems to accelerators and microwave tubes. Modern design standards use “susceptibility diagrams” for multipactor based on theory developed in the 1950s by Hatch and Williams, which considers multipactor as a resonant discharge. Observed discrepancies with experiment are accounted for by the addition of arbitrary margins that have no theoretical basis. Modern theories acknowledge that multipactor does not necessarily have a single resonance, but can exhibit higher periodicity, or even non-resonant forms. These theories, however, rarely depart from the conventional paradigm of presuming a multipactor mode, then deriving the conditions for that mode, an exercise that can be exceedingly difficult for more complex trajectories. A novel approach based on the methodology of nonlinear dynamics and chaos is presented, in which all possible modes are recovered with no a priori assumptions. Thenewmethodologysystematicallyappliesiterativemapstoidentifymultipactingregion boundaries and stability more reliably and comprehensively than existing models. It does so by globally analyzing the structure of dynamical space, resulting in bifurcation diagrams that summarize all possible multipactor modes over a wide range of parameters. This information is combined with secondary electron emission properties of the surface material to predict multipactor growth rates and identify parameter regions that are multipactor free. Three-dimensional simulations with the WARP PIC code successfully validate the model under more realistic conditions of random emission velocities of secondaries and more realistic rf field profiles.

Bio: Rami A. Kishek is a Research Professor at the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics at the University of Maryland (UMD), where he leads the effort on the University of Maryland Electron Ring Laboratory, a small research accelerator investigating space charge dynamics. He received his B.S.E. (1993) in Electrical Engineering, M.S.E. (1995) and Ph.D. (1997) in Nuclear Engineering, all from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Professor Kishek has over 20 years’ experience in charged particle dynamics and is an expert on space charge effects, computation, and multipactor, where he made groundbreaking contributions to its theoretical modeling. He is a scientific consultant for multiple companies and has advised or co-advised 15 PhD students and guided the research of dozens more graduate, undergraduate, and high school students, and regularly teaches at the US Particle Accelerator School. Kishek is a fellow of APS and the 2015 recipient of the USPAS Prize for Achievement in Accelerator Physics and Technology.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 28 Sep 2017 09:13:42 -0400 2017-09-29T16:00:00-04:00 2017-09-29T17:00:00-04:00 Cooley Building Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Lecture / Discussion Cooley Building
HEP-Astro Seminar | Evolution of Reactor Flux and Spectrum at Daya Bay and the implications on the Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly (October 2, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42185 42185-9584873@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 2, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The reactor antineutrino anomaly (RAA) has been puzzling reactor neutrino physics community since 2011. The RAA refers to the deficit of electron antineutrinos detected by reactor neutrino experiments compared with the number of electron antineutrinos predicted by state of the art reactor models. The Daya Bay experiment has utilized eight functionally identical underground detectors to sample reactor antineutrino fluxes from three pairs of nuclear reactors in South China, accruing the largest reactor antineutrino sample to date. This talk will summarize Daya Bay's most recent result, which presents observations of correlations between reactor core fuel evolution and changes in the detected reactor antineutrino flux and energy spectrum. A 10σ variation in IBD yield was found to be energy-dependent, rejecting the hypothesis of a constant antineutrino energy spectrum at 5.1 standard deviations. While measurements of the linear variation with respect to the fuel content in the IBD spectrum show general agreement with predictions from recent reactor models, the measured linear variation with respect to the fuel content in the total IBD yield disagrees with recent predictions. This discrepancy indicates that an overall deficit in measured flux with respect to predictions does not result from equal fractional deficits from the primary fission isotopes 235U, 239Pu, 238U, and 241Pu. A 7.8% discrepancy between the observed and predicted 235U yield suggests that this isotope may be the primary contributor to the reactor antineutrino anomaly.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Oct 2017 18:16:32 -0400 2017-10-02T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-02T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Special Cosmology Seminar | SPIDER: Searching for Primordial Gravitational Waves From a Long Duration Balloon (October 3, 2017 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45275 45275-10150117@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 3, 2017 3:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: Department of Physics

SPIDER is a CMB polarimeter that completed its first long duration ballooning flight from Antarctica in January 2015. From its vantage point at 36 km above the ground, it observed 12% of the sky over 16 days at 94 and 150 GHz. I will discuss the design of SPIDER, including our reasons for choosing the ballooning platform. I will also describe some of the subsystems and how they performed during flight. Then I will show preliminary results from the ongoing data analysis. Finally, I will give an update on SPIDER 2, which will add focal planes at 280 GHz to improve our sensitivity to Galactic dust, and is expected to fly in December of 2018.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Oct 2017 08:20:44 -0400 2017-10-03T15:00:00-04:00 2017-10-03T16:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
CM-AMO Seminar | The Power of Strong Spin-Orbit Interactions: Electrical Control of Structural and Physical Properties of Iridates (October 3, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42186 42186-9584874@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 3, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Effects of spin-orbit interactions in condensed matter are an important and rapidly evolving topic. Strong competition between spin-orbit, on-site Coulomb and crystalline electric field interactions in iridates drives exotic quantum states that are unique to this group of materials. In this talk, we briefly review current experimental studies of iridates, and then present results of our recent study on electrical-current controlled behavior in iridates. Electrical control of structural and physical properties is a long-sought, but elusive goal of contemporary science and technology. We demonstrate that a combination of strong spin-orbit interactions (SOI) and a canted antiferromagnetic (AFM) Mott state is sufficient to attain that goal. The AFM insulator Sr_2IrO_4 provides a model system in which strong SOI lock canted Ir magnetic moments to IrO_6-octahedra, causing them to rigidly rotate together. A novel coupling between an applied electrical current and the canting angle reduces the Néel temperature and drives a large, non-linear lattice expansion that closely tracks the magnetization, increases the electron mobility, and precipitates a unique resistive switching effect. These observations open new avenues for understanding fundamental physics driven by strong SOI in condensed matter, and provide a new paradigm for functional materials and devices.


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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 03 Oct 2017 18:16:34 -0400 2017-10-03T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-03T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag | Operator Dynamics in Quantum Chaos: Part I - Internal Degrees of Freedom (October 4, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45281 45281-10150121@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 4, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

We study operator growth in quantum chaos by considering the SYK model, a toy model of holography containing only internal degrees of freedom which evolve via q-local interactions. First, we note that the product length of an operator is directly related to its sensitivity to small perturbations. This reveals that in the SYK model, the commutator-squared/out-of-time-ordered correlator - a new diagnostic of quantum chaos - is literally measuring the effective length of the operator. It is known that this quantity grows exponentially in time with a "Lyapunov exponent", and thus we conclude that lengths of operators grows exponentially in time (amongst the internal degrees of freedom). Motivated by this, we group the operators into families defined by their lengths, thereby explicitly solving for the coarse-grained dynamics of an operator in the large N, large q limit. We also note that one can understand the time evolution of operators by relating it to the quantum mechanics of a particle on a graph with a nontrivial topology. Lastly, we may make some comments on the bulk interpretation of operator growth in SYK.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Oct 2017 10:13:11 -0400 2017-10-04T12:00:00-04:00 2017-10-04T13:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | The Softest Crystals (October 4, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42301 42301-9595525@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 4, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Usually, crystals have three-dimensional periodicity. Smectic liquid crystals, however, have one-dimensional order, even in three-dimensional samples. These systems, as simple as they might seem, connect the physics of biomembranes, superconductivity, and even special relativity. I will provide an introduction for non-specialists and show how this diverse set of ideas comes together in these very, very soft systems.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 04 Oct 2017 18:16:41 -0400 2017-10-04T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-04T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Mapping in the Enlightenment: Science, Innovation, and the Public Sphere (October 6, 2017 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/40535 40535-9675040@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 6, 2017 10:00am
Location: William Clements Library
Organized By: William L. Clements Library

This exhibit uses examples from the Clements Library collection to tell the story of creating, distributing, and using maps during the long 18th century. Enlightenment thinking stimulated the effort to make more accurate maps, encouraged the growth of map collecting and map use by men and women in all social classes, and expanded the role of maps in administration and decision-making throughout Europe and her overseas colonies.

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Exhibition Thu, 20 Apr 2017 09:21:37 -0400 2017-10-06T10:00:00-04:00 2017-10-06T16:00:00-04:00 William Clements Library William L. Clements Library Exhibition Cassini Planisphere
Life After Grad School | Being a Physicist Business Leader, and the Art of People Management (October 6, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42187 42187-9584875@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 6, 2017 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

I always wanted to be a teacher. And then once I got to grad school I learned that being a professor and running a lab required much more. Setting a research vision, budgets and funding, building the lab, recruiting students, guiding and growing them, and keeping the whole ship running… it wasn't mostly teaching the way I thought it was. If those were the things I was going to do anyways, I decided to do them in the business world and shipped myself off to Silicon Valley. I'll talk to you about what it’s like being a physicist in the business world, and what I've learned along my random walk. I'll go deeper on people management as the critical skill to scaling yourself. And I'll leave plenty of time for questions on anything, or to hear thoughts you have.

Joel leads the global Sales Planning & Operations org which scales Facebook's business. Prior to Facebook, Joel worked at Yahoo! leading the Americas Ad Marketplaces team and as the Chief of Staff to the CEO, and prior to that worked with McKinsey & Company leading digital media business growth in high tech. Joel holds a B.S.E. in Engineering Physics from the University of Michigan and an M.S. in Applied Physics from Caltech. And Joel still wants to be a teacher, someday.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 06 Oct 2017 18:16:47 -0400 2017-10-06T12:00:00-04:00 2017-10-06T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminar | Exploring the Low Mass Frontier in Dark Matter Direct Detection (October 6, 2017 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45282 45282-10150122@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 6, 2017 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

I will discuss ideas and prospects to search for sub-GeV dark matter, below the typical thresholds of current direct detection experiments. While WIMP dark matter with mass above a GeV is increasingly constrained, there is a wide landscape of interesting candidates that may require new kinds of direct detection targets. I will highlight examples covering the meV-GeV mass range, including prospects for absorption of bosonic dark matter with current semiconductor targets as well as proposals to detect scattering of sub-MeV dark matter.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Oct 2017 10:24:28 -0400 2017-10-06T15:00:00-04:00 2017-10-06T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Saturday Morning Physics | The Arctic and the Tropics: Worlds Apart, Both Amplifying Climate Change (October 7, 2017 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/44328 44328-9908895@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, October 7, 2017 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

(Part of the Bicentennial LSA Theme Semester Symposium MC²: Michigan & the Climate Crisis)
Humans have rapidly changed our Earth's climate, well beyond the natural variations recorded over at least the last million years. This perturbation has reached the point where other parts of the natural system are poised to change their behavior through accelerating feedbacks. Melting of permafrost in the Arctic and deforestation of forests and agroforestry systems in the tropics are two such important examples. These feedbacks are poorly understood, but have the potential to alter the globe as we know it and critically test humanity's resolve for mitigation and ability to adapt.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 27 Sep 2017 13:44:47 -0400 2017-10-07T10:30:00-04:00 2017-10-07T11:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Workshop / Seminar Weiser Hall
Special Physics Lecture | The Ultracold Neutron Physics Program at the ILL (October 9, 2017 2:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45542 45542-10228832@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 9, 2017 2:30pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) is an international research centre at the leading edge of neutron science and technology. As the world’s flagship centre for neutron science, the ILL provides scientists with a very high flux of neutrons feeding some 40 state-of-the-art instruments, which are constantly being developed and upgraded.
The instruments of the nuclear and particle physics group (NPP) and their fields of research are briefly presented.
ILL’s two ultracold neutron installations are described in more detail.
The ongoing research program using ultracold neutrons as measuring the lifetime of the free neutron, the search for an electric dipole moment and gravity resonance spectroscopy are highlighted.

About the Speaker:
Peter W.H. Geltenbort received a PhD from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, in 1983. He joined the Nuclear and Particle Physics (NPP) College at the ILL in 1983 responsible for a fission fragment spectrometer. From 1989 to 1993 he held the position of Head of the Detector Group. In 1993 he reintegrated into the NPP group responsible for the Ultracold Neutron/Very Cold Neutron facilities at the ILL. His current research interests are the fundamental properties of the neutron.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 09 Oct 2017 10:33:57 -0400 2017-10-09T14:30:00-04:00 2017-10-09T15:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) (October 9, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45095 45095-10084361@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 9, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The last 24 months did not only see the first direct detection of gravitational waves by LIGO but also the successful launch and operation of the LISA Pathfinder (LPF) mission. While the LIGO detection sparked the scientific and public interest in these 'mysterious' waves, the LPF results show that a space-based gravitational wave observatory is within reach. This Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) has the goal to detect the infrasound of the universe over five decades in frequency centered around a few mHz. Expected sources range from hundred thousand compact galactic binaries to extreme mass ratio inspirals out to redshifts up to 2 to massive and supermassive black hole mergers in the million to hundred million solar mass mass range out to redshifts of 20. LIGO sources years before the merger have recently been added to LISA's source catalogue. LISA will use free falling cubic test masses as the end points of their 2.5 Gm long interferometer arms. As shown by LPF, these test masses follow their geodesics with spurious accelerations below a femto-g/√Hz. LISA will use laser interferometry to measure distance changes between the test masses at the few pm √Hz level. ESA is leading the LISA project and NASA is exploring how to participate as a minority partner. LISA is ESA's L3 mission with an expected launch in the early 2030s. I will discuss LISA's payload and also the schedule of the LISA mission.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 09 Oct 2017 18:16:41 -0400 2017-10-09T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-09T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Army Research Laboratory Efforts in Complexity and Emergence (October 10, 2017 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/44903 44903-10003618@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 10, 2017 11:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: The Center for the Study of Complex Systems

*NOTE NEW LOCATION - 10TH FLOOR WEISER FLOOR*

Abstract
The Army Research Laboratory has recently singled out basic research in Complexity and Emergence spanning the physical, biological, social, and engineering sciences as a one of a small set of future essential research areas. Inspiration to recognize this domain largely stems from both a plethora of advances in the scientific community as well as high-level Army strategy and policy. A recent report on Army Science Strategy and Planning describes how the Army must contend with problems wherein objectives and constraints evolve in unpredictable ways and how complexity arises from the increasing heterogeneity, connectivity, scale, dynamics, functionality and interdependence of networked elements. Leaning forward, the Army places priority on developing mathematical models for predicting non-equilibrium behavior of complex multi-scale systems that advance our understanding beyond statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics. After a brief but broad overview of the Army Research enterprise, the talk will discuss how the Complex Dynamics and Systems program at the Army Research Office is advancing this call in areas such as the emergent physics of animal locomotion, guided self-organization, and transdisciplinary efforts at the intersection of statistical mechanics and control theory. Highlights of several ongoing Laboratory research efforts will also be presented for potential collaborative efforts.

Light Refreshments will be served.

This special seminar will take place in the new event space - 10th floor Weiser Hall.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 04 Oct 2017 11:32:45 -0400 2017-10-10T11:30:00-04:00 2017-10-10T13:00:00-04:00 Weiser Hall The Center for the Study of Complex Systems Workshop / Seminar Event Flyer
CM-AMO Seminar | The “Saturn-Rings” Drop and Other Electrohydrodynamic Instabilities (October 10, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42188 42188-9584876@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 10, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

I will present some intriguing instabilities of a droplet in a uniform electric field: drop rotation, surface vortices, and formation of rings encircling the drop. I will discuss how these instabilities arise from the coupling of fluid flow, interface deformation, and charge convection.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 10 Oct 2017 18:17:14 -0400 2017-10-10T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-10T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
A Data-Driven World: Potentials and Pitfalls (October 11, 2017 8:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/42894 42894-9675069@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 11, 2017 8:00am
Location: Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.)
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Data Science

Please join us for the Michigan Institute for Data Science Annual Symposium, “A Data-Driven World: Potential and Pitfalls.” The symposium will feature preeminent data scientists whose work is on the leading edge of innovation and discovery in data-intensive science, as well as a poster session highlighting data science research at U-M.

KEYNOTE
Cathy O’Neil is the author of the New York Times bestselling Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, which was also a semifinalist for the National Book Award.

SPEAKERS
* Daniela Witten, Assoc. Prof. of Statistics and Biostatistics, University of Washington
* James Pennebaker, Prof. of Psychology, University of Texas
* Francesca Dominici, Prof. of Biostatistics, Harvard
* Nadya Bliss, Director, Global Security Initiative, Arizona State University

POSTER SESSION
Posters will be on display featuring data science research from across the University

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Conference / Symposium Tue, 05 Sep 2017 12:03:42 -0400 2017-10-11T08:00:00-04:00 2017-10-11T17:00:00-04:00 Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.) Michigan Institute for Data Science Conference / Symposium MIDAS logo
HET Brown Bag Seminar | Soft Photons, Soft Gravitons and Decoherence (October 11, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45552 45552-10228908@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 11, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

Central to the solution of the infrared catastrophe of quantum electrodynamics and perturbative quantum gravity is the idea that detection apparatus inevitably have limited resolution and, in any scattering process, an infinite number of arbitrarily soft photons and gravitons are produced and escape detection. Photons and gravitons have polarizations and momenta and one might suspect that those which escape can carry away a significant amount of information. In this talk, I will examine the question as to the quantity of this information loss, its consequences.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 09 Oct 2017 11:16:47 -0400 2017-10-11T12:00:00-04:00 2017-10-11T13:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | Prophecies of the Coming Flood (October 11, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44505 44505-9923099@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 11, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Our planet provides clues that geologists can interpret to tell us how our planet has responded to past climate change. These clues tell a story of massive mountains of ice—called ice sheets—that covered huge portions of our planet. These mountains of ice waxed and waned over millennia resulting in massive floods. We used to think that these glacial cycles (and floods) were driven by changes in atmospheric temperature. However, evidence shows that the long term growth and decay of these ice mountains were punctuated by abrupt, rapid ice sheet changes. These disintegration events involved the near total disintegration of large sections of ice sheets in as little as a few centuries resulting in meters or even tens of meters of sea level rise. Surprisingly, the onset of ice sheet disintegration is not correlated with atmospheric temperature; many events initiating during periods when atmospheric temperatures were extremely cold. Today, we have two mountains of ice remaining called the Greenland Ice Sheet and West Antarctic Ice Sheet. We are increasingly witnessing retreat, decay and disintegration in portions of these ice sheets on a scale that is unprecedented over the past ten thousand years and this has (re)awakened concern that irreversible ice sheet collapse, perhaps analogous to past ice sheet disintegration may have already begun. This concern has been amplified by modeling studies suggesting the near total disintegration of large portions of the ice sheets in as little as a few centuries. At present these predictions remain prophecies, clouded by uncertainty and affected by choices we as a society have yet to make. Here I will review some of the past changes hinted at by clues in the geological record and summarize more recent changes, like the ongoing retreat of the Larsen ice shelves in Antarctica that we are currently observing. I will also summarize how work that my group is doing increasingly points towards the ocean as the trigger for past, present and future ice sheet disintegration events. Finally, I will conclude by discussing the limitations of current ice sheet models and why this uncertainty coupled with intrinsic non-linearities in the dynamic system limits us to prophesying a range of discrete fates for the ice sheets, but unable to pick which of these fates is our destiny. Unfortunately, even the most optimistic of the fates we can foresee results in significant ice sheet decay, sea level rise and coastal flooding in the coming century.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 11 Oct 2017 18:16:36 -0400 2017-10-11T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-11T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Mapping in the Enlightenment: Science, Innovation, and the Public Sphere (October 13, 2017 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/40535 40535-9675041@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 13, 2017 10:00am
Location: William Clements Library
Organized By: William L. Clements Library

This exhibit uses examples from the Clements Library collection to tell the story of creating, distributing, and using maps during the long 18th century. Enlightenment thinking stimulated the effort to make more accurate maps, encouraged the growth of map collecting and map use by men and women in all social classes, and expanded the role of maps in administration and decision-making throughout Europe and her overseas colonies.

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Exhibition Thu, 20 Apr 2017 09:21:37 -0400 2017-10-13T10:00:00-04:00 2017-10-13T16:00:00-04:00 William Clements Library William L. Clements Library Exhibition Cassini Planisphere
Saturday Morning Physics | Beyond Our Solar System: Witnessing the Formation of Exotic Worlds (October 14, 2017 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/44381 44381-9911800@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, October 14, 2017 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

Planets form out of cool gas-rich disks of material encircling young stars. Much of our theoretical understanding for this process has been based off of our best-studied example, our own Solar System. However, the discovery of new exotic planets and orbital architectures has demonstrated nature is far more creative than we had imagined. In this talk Dr. Cleeves will highlight exciting new results regarding our understanding of planet formation, and speculate on what these results may mean for forming new, potentially habitable, worlds.

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 14 Sep 2017 09:46:46 -0400 2017-10-14T10:30:00-04:00 2017-10-14T11:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Workshop / Seminar Headshot of Ilse Cleeves
Department Colloquium | Dark Matter (October 18, 2017 4:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/44506 44506-9923100@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 18, 2017 4:00am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

This talk will present an overview of the compelling astrophysical and cosmological evidence that one quarter the mass of the Universe is of a completely new kind: Dark Matter. It remains however entirely unknown what constitutes Dark Matter. What we do know places some constraints and a few requirements on experimental searches for Dark Matter particles, which will be sketched out. Some particularly promising techniques and their status to tackle the identification of Dark Matter will also be described in this talk.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 18 Oct 2017 18:16:48 -0400 2017-10-18T04:00:00-04:00 2017-10-18T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
8th MIPSE Graduate Student Symposium (October 18, 2017 2:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45703 45703-10262640@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 18, 2017 2:30pm
Location: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Plasma Science and Engineering (MIPSE)

The 8th Annual MIPSE (Michigan Institute for Plasma Science and Engineering) Graduate Student Symposium will be held 18 October 2017. The Symposium will feature poster presentations by UM, MSU, and WMU graduate students engaged in research across the entire range of plasma topics. All student presentations will be considered for the Best Presentation Award.

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Conference / Symposium Thu, 12 Oct 2017 11:52:29 -0400 2017-10-18T14:30:00-04:00 2017-10-18T19:40:00-04:00 Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building Michigan Institute for Plasma Science and Engineering (MIPSE) Conference / Symposium MIPSE Graduate Symposium
CM Theory Seminar | Quantum Dynamics with Statistical Effects and Statistical Models of Quantum Effects (October 19, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45035 45035-10072842@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, October 19, 2017 4:00pm
Location: Chemistry Dow Lab
Organized By: Department of Physics

The capability of electronic structure to calculate the wavefunctions, and even dynamics of large systems has improved dramatically. This has put electronic structure into an uncomfortable regime where statistical effects become as important as the correlation problem. I will discuss our efforts to describe mixed-state electronic dynamics with density matrix equations of motion, and the applications of those theories to ultrafast experiments.

Realtime mean field theories such as RT-TDDFT and RT-TDHF dominate applications because of the speed required to access picosecond timescales. Yet TDHF and TDDFT are not accurate enough to properly model resonant driving, which is only one ingredient in ultrafast spectroscopy. In this talk I discuss a simple density-matrix equation of motion implemented as an approximation to RT-TDDFT, which excites properly on resonance. Based on this foundation I compare the non-equilibrium steady states of the correct DFT and a Markovian bath model, with essentially exact results coming from HEOM showing that TDDFT can be used to study driven ultrafast dynamics. I then discuss self-consistency in correlated corrections to TDDFT which have low cost and can be applied to large systems.

Statistical sampling of molecular geometries has become an equally important issue, although empirical density functionals, which are the most practical tools for exploring geometries, make an ambiguous mixture of quantum physics and statistical modeling. I will demonstrate purely statistical models of molecular structure, and show that in the near future it is likely that purely empirical models of the PES will have several appealing advantages over empirical hybrids. of quantum mechanical models with statistics.

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 19 Oct 2017 18:16:45 -0400 2017-10-19T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-19T17:00:00-04:00 Chemistry Dow Lab Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar Chemistry Dow Lab
Mapping in the Enlightenment: Science, Innovation, and the Public Sphere (October 20, 2017 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/40535 40535-9675042@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 20, 2017 10:00am
Location: William Clements Library
Organized By: William L. Clements Library

This exhibit uses examples from the Clements Library collection to tell the story of creating, distributing, and using maps during the long 18th century. Enlightenment thinking stimulated the effort to make more accurate maps, encouraged the growth of map collecting and map use by men and women in all social classes, and expanded the role of maps in administration and decision-making throughout Europe and her overseas colonies.

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Exhibition Thu, 20 Apr 2017 09:21:37 -0400 2017-10-20T10:00:00-04:00 2017-10-20T16:00:00-04:00 William Clements Library William L. Clements Library Exhibition Cassini Planisphere
Special Astronomy Talk | Light Pollution: Simple Solutions for a Serious Environmental Issue (October 20, 2017 3:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45806 45806-10307559@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 20, 2017 3:30pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Light pollution is increasingly a major environmental threat. In addition to obscuring the night sky, the destruction of the natural nocturnal environment disrupts the behavior of countless species, triggering biological abnormalities and seriously impacting the health of many populations, including our own. Light pollution is a waste of energy, generated simply by human thoughtlessness and poor planning. Although meant to improve public safety, many lighting systems actually compromise safety. Light pollution is easy to address by good planning and public awareness, and at low financial cost. There is already substantial awareness of light pollution in Michigan, where dark skies are a recognized commodity. I will review the types of light pollution, safety and environmental impacts, and easy things everyone can do to help.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 16 Oct 2017 08:55:53 -0400 2017-10-20T15:30:00-04:00 2017-10-20T16:30:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Saturday Morning Physics | Fine Tuning the Universe (October 21, 2017 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/44382 44382-9911802@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, October 21, 2017 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

The chemical evolution of the universe begins a second after the Big Bang and continues to the present day. The fusion of small nuclei into larger ones occurs in numerous astrophysical sites with undeniable ramifications to life on Earth. If conditions had been different across the multitude of nucleosynthesis environments, then some claim that there would be no possibility of life in this universe. In this talk, Dr. Grohs will examine anthropic arguments particular to nuclear astrophysics, and discuss applications to habitability in potentially other universes within a multiverse framework.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 13 Sep 2017 13:40:19 -0400 2017-10-21T10:30:00-04:00 2017-10-21T11:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Workshop / Seminar Weiser Hall
Quantitative Biology Seminar | The ParA/MinD Family of ATPases Make Waves to Position DNA, Cell Division, and Organelles in Bacteria (October 23, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45906 45906-10324587@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 23, 2017 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Positional information in eukaryotic cells is mainly orchestrated by cytoskeletal highways and their associated motor proteins like Myosin, Kinesin, and Dynein. Bacteria don't have motors, so how are they spatially organized? I will be discussing three members of the ParA/MinD family of ATPases that are part of self organizing systems that put things in their place in cells across the microbial world. I will first present the ATPase called ParA, which is part of the most common DNA-segregation system in bacteria. ParA proteins form dynamic waves on the nucleoid to position chromosomes and plasmids in opposite cell-halves so that they are faithfully inherited after cell division. I will then discuss the ATPase called MinD, which is part of a system that forms oscillatory waves on the inner membrane. The oscillation aligns cell division at mid-cell so that daughter cells are equal in size. Finally, I will introduce a new member of this ATPase family we call McdA, which is part of an organelle trafficking system in bacteria. Yes. Bacteria have organelles. Our work is shedding light on what seems to be a general mode of subcellular organization in bacteria – dynamic protein gradients surfing biological surfaces to impart positional information for a wide variety of fundamental biological processes. My new lab focuses on subcellular organization in bacteria with a strong emphasis towards reconstituting the self-organizing activities of these systems in a cell-free setup using purified and fluorescent labeled components. By visualizing the biochemistry driving self-organization outside the cell we are able to provide comprehensive molecular mechanisms that explain subcellular organization inside the cell.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 23 Oct 2017 18:16:35 -0400 2017-10-23T12:00:00-04:00 2017-10-23T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | The Coolest Place in the Solar System: New Worlds Beyond Neptune from the Dark Energy Survey (October 23, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45789 45789-10279562@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 23, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The Dark Energy Survey is carrying out a 5-year survey of one-eighth of the sky using the 4-meter Blanco telescope in Chile and its state-of-the-art 570 Mpix camera, DECam. Though this dataset was primarily envisioned for cosmology and extragalactic science, our University of Michigan group has developed it into a powerful tool to study the solar system beyond Neptune. The hundreds of new objects we've discovered include a dwarf-planet-sized object at nearly three times Pluto's distance, and several "extreme trans-Neptunian objects" whose orbits may hint at the presence of a ~10 earth-mass ninth planet. I'll discuss these discoveries in our own cosmic back yard, and their implications for what may lie beyond.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 23 Oct 2017 18:16:35 -0400 2017-10-23T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-23T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Controlling Electronic Structure and Correlations in Artificial Quantum Materials (October 24, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42189 42189-9584877@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 24, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Our ability to control the electronic structure of materials, for instance at semiconductor interfaces, has had enormous scientific and technological implications. Recently, this concept has been extended to materials which possess inherently strong quantum many-body interactions, such as strongly correlated transition metal oxides, allowing us to synthesize artificial heterostructures which can harbor novel electronic or magnetic properties. The ability to deterministically manipulate the strength of electron correlations or the electronic band structure will be critical to designing new materials with novel properties. I will describe some examples of our recent work in thin films of nickelates (LaNiO3) and ruthenates (the odd-parity superconductor Sr2RuO4), and how we have used both epitaxial strain as well as dimensional confinement in atomically thin films to control the strength of electronic correlations, the electronic band structure, the Fermi surface topology, and drive a metal-insulator transition. These new insights could someday enable deterministic control over the emergent properties of quantum materials.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 24 Oct 2017 18:22:34 -0400 2017-10-24T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-24T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag | Extended Steinmann Relations and Cosmic Galois Theory in Planar N = 4 (October 25, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46076 46076-10387184@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 25, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

While traditional methods for calculating scattering amplitudes prove too computationally intensive to be useful at higher loop orders, a great deal is now known about the analytic and kinematic properties of amplitudes to all orders in planar N=4. This information can be leveraged to construct these amplitudes directly, by putting together an ansatz of the relevant class of functions and requiring that it share the distinctive properties of a given amplitude. In this talk, I will describe how this bootstrap-type approach can be used to uniquely determine all six-particle amplitudes in this theory through (at least) five loops, focusing on how these methods make transparent the Steinmann relations and bear out the predictions of cosmic Galois theory. I will also discuss how these methods can be generalized to quantities of direct relevance to particle physics experiments.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 23 Oct 2017 08:56:36 -0400 2017-10-25T12:00:00-04:00 2017-10-25T13:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | Highlights from Recent LIGO and Virgo Observations (October 25, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44697 44697-9968977@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, October 25, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Following the first Advanced LIGO data run (O1) in fall 2015, which included two definitive gravitational wave discoveries of binary black hole mergers, LIGO commissioners spent much of 2016 working to improve detector sensitivity, with mixed success. Data taking resumed with the start of the O2 run near the end of 2016 and continued through the summer of 2017, yielding additional discoveries. For the last several weeks of the O2 run, the European gravitational wave detector, Virgo, also collected data in parallel, providing not only independent corroboration of detection, but also dramatically improving source localization via triangulation across the Earth's surface. Highlights from early analysis of the O2 observations will be presented.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 25 Oct 2017 18:16:41 -0400 2017-10-25T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-25T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Mapping in the Enlightenment: Science, Innovation, and the Public Sphere (October 27, 2017 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/40535 40535-9675043@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 27, 2017 10:00am
Location: William Clements Library
Organized By: William L. Clements Library

This exhibit uses examples from the Clements Library collection to tell the story of creating, distributing, and using maps during the long 18th century. Enlightenment thinking stimulated the effort to make more accurate maps, encouraged the growth of map collecting and map use by men and women in all social classes, and expanded the role of maps in administration and decision-making throughout Europe and her overseas colonies.

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Exhibition Thu, 20 Apr 2017 09:21:37 -0400 2017-10-27T10:00:00-04:00 2017-10-27T16:00:00-04:00 William Clements Library William L. Clements Library Exhibition Cassini Planisphere
HET Brown Bag Seminar | Landau Singularities and the Amplituhedron (October 27, 2017 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46077 46077-10387186@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 27, 2017 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

Modern methods for computing scattering amplitudes in quantum field theory get enormous mileage out of knowledge (or assumed knowledge) of their singularity structure. I will demonstrate how, in the very special case of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, all information about this singularity structure can (in principle) be derived via combinatorial geometry problems using the amplituhedron, providing thereby the basic input to the "amplitude bootstrap" program.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 23 Oct 2017 09:02:47 -0400 2017-10-27T15:00:00-04:00 2017-10-27T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Saturday Morning Physics | We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe (October 28, 2017 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/44383 44383-9911803@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, October 28, 2017 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

James Robert Walker Memorial Lecture
'We Have No Idea' is a fun, interactive presentation about everything that we DON’T know about the Universe, from the origin of our cosmos, to the dark matter that surrounds us. It features science and live cartooning. No scientific knowledge required, just a sense of curiosity and a sense of humor!

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 13 Sep 2017 13:38:06 -0400 2017-10-28T10:30:00-04:00 2017-10-28T11:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Workshop / Seminar Weiser Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | From Muon Colliders Toward an Accelerator-Driven Subcritical Reactor (October 30, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45824 45824-10310498@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, October 30, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Subcriticial nuclear reactors have been considered an alternative to conventional nuclear reactors for years. Development and operation of high-power SRF particle accelerators at two US national laboratories allows us to consider a less-expensive nuclear reactor that operates without the need for a critical core, fuel enrichment, or reprocessing.

I'll describe a reactor that without redesign will burn spent nuclear fuel, natural uranium, thorium, or surplus weapons material. I’ll talk about my company, Muons, Inc., and our history as an SBIR company devoted to a design of a future particle accelerator, the Muon Collder, and how innovations that came out of those R&D efforts have helped shape our vision of a new, sustainable, zero carbon footprint energy source to replace our current fossil fuel regime.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 30 Oct 2017 18:16:52 -0400 2017-10-30T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-30T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Raman Spectroscopy Studies of Charge Order in Metallic La-doped Sr3Ir2O7 (October 31, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42190 42190-9584878@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, October 31, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Charge order has been universally observed in underdoped copper-oxide based high-Tc superconductors (cuprates) and shown to compete with superconductivity. In a strong spin orbit coupled cuprate analogue system, layered perovskite iridium oxides (iridates), Mott insulating, pseudogap and d-wave gap behaviors have been discovered in the single layer variant Sr2IrO4, while metal insulator transition and charge-order like Fermi surface instability has only been seen in the bilayer counterpart Sr3Ir2O7. However, a full symmetry characterization on the charge order in Sr3Ir2O7 is yet missing, making its analogy to the charge order in cuprates incomplete. In this talk, I will show that an amplitude mode of charge order at ~25cm-1 is detected in the metallic La-doped Sr3Ir2O7 at temperatures below ~ 200K by using Raman spectroscopy, which is reminiscent of that observed in cuprates. I will further show that this charge order has two-fold rotational symmetry, breaking the four-fold one of the crystal lattice, which is the same as the unidirectional charge order in cuprates does. Finally, I will discuss the weak coupling between the charge order and the lattice by tracking the phonon evolution upon the emergence of the charge order.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 31 Oct 2017 18:16:26 -0400 2017-10-31T16:00:00-04:00 2017-10-31T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Seminars | Searching for Dark Matter in Distant Galaxies (November 1, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46335 46335-10464010@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 1, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

Galaxies beyond our own represent some of the brightest potential sources of dark matter flux on the sky. As such they represent excellent candidates for indirect detection and in this talk I will demonstrate how to exploit this information to search for dark matter using the Fermi telescope. In particular I will outline how to map from an observed baryonic galaxy to its underlying dark matter distribution and a demonstration that our methods work in a simulated N-body environment.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 30 Oct 2017 08:42:34 -0400 2017-11-01T12:00:00-04:00 2017-11-01T13:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | Blazing a Trail: Towards Imaging Super-Earth from the Ground and Space (November 1, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44698 44698-9968978@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 1, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets has been data-driven: clearly there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. As the demographics of the myriad diverse systems becomes known, we begin to piece together the larger story of their formation and evolution. Ultimately, we seek to understand the prospects for life elsewhere in the Universe. In addition to this scientific quest, 'exploration' also plays a role. In particular, the nearest star systems provide an opportunity to explore in detail strange new worlds. The recent announcement of a planet < 10 Mearth in the liquid-water zone of Proxima Centari sent shock waves through the community. What is the nature of this planetary system found in our own galactic backyard? Could it be habitable? How will we know and when? Here we will review recent progress in imaging planets from the ground, contributions the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope will make in imaging sub-Saturns (perhaps with habitable moons) at larger orbital radii, and complementary work to be done by next generation Extremely Large Telescopes in thermal emission as well as NASA's WFIRST-AFTA in reflected light, which will enable us to image terrestrial planets around the nearest stars by the end of the next decade.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 01 Nov 2017 18:16:35 -0400 2017-11-01T16:00:00-04:00 2017-11-01T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics in the 21st Century: Ruminations about Physics & Complexity (November 2, 2017 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/46177 46177-10409856@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 2, 2017 11:30am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: The Center for the Study of Complex Systems

The 20th Century saw physics and our corresponding understanding of the world around us virtually explode. Relativity and quantum mechanics totally revolutionized the way we describe matter and energy and led to astonishing discoveries and technological advances. In 1900, the electron had just been discovered and the structure of the atom was just being probed. By 2000, we could “see” atoms, use general relativity to correct atomic clocks for use in the GPS system, produce Bose-Einstein condensates at nano-Kelvin, detect signatures of the big bang, and countless other scientific marvels without parallel in human history. But are the paradigms of 20th century physics still robust and useful for the challenges of the 21st century? As Neils Bohr famously said “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” (sometimes wrongly attributed to Yogi Bera) so I will avoid that trap to the degree possible. Instead, I will ruminate about the amazing progress in physics in the past and suggest some of the big challenges that lie ahead in which complexity may play an important role.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 25 Oct 2017 13:25:03 -0400 2017-11-02T11:30:00-04:00 2017-11-02T13:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location The Center for the Study of Complex Systems Workshop / Seminar Robert Ecke Talk Poster
MICDE/CM Theory Seminar | Light Controlled Topological Phase Transitions in Multi-Orbital and Frustrated Magnetic Systems (November 2, 2017 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46437 46437-10489749@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 2, 2017 2:00pm
Location: East Hall
Organized By: Interdisciplinary QC/CM Seminars

Spurred by recent progress in melting, enhancement and induction of electronic order out of equilibrium, a tantalizing prospect concerns instead accessing transient Floquet steady states via broad pump pulses, to affect electronic properties. Here, we consider a two-pronged approach to manipulate the topology of a band insulator, as well as topological order in a Mott insulator. We first develop a strategy to understand non-equilibrium Floquet-Bloch bands and topological transitions directly from ab initio calculations, and illustrate for the example of WS2 that control of chiral edge modes can be dictated solely from symmetry principles and is not qualitatively sensitive to microscopic materials details. Second, we extend these ideas to strongly correlated systems and show that pumping frustrated Mott insulators with circularly-polarized light can drive the effective spin system across a phase transition to a chiral spin liquid (CSL).The results presented suggest new avenues to marry dynamical symmetry breaking, strong interactions, and ab initio materials modelling, to access elusive phase transitions that are not readily accessible in equilibrium.

BIO: Professor Devereaux received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1988 & 1991, respectively. He is the Director of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), the Associate Lab Director (ALD) for Photon Science, a professor in the Photon Science Faculty at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University and a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. His main research interests lie in the areas of theoretical condensed matter physics and computational physics. His research effort focuses on using the tools of computational physics to understand quantum materials. His group carries out numerical simulations on SIMES’ high-performance supercomputer, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and other US and Canadian computational facilities.

Prof. Devereaux is being hosted by Prof. Gull (Physics). If you are interested in meeting him please send an email to mcteja@umich.edu.

For more information visit http://micde.umich.edu/event/micde-seminar-thomas-devereaux-photon-science-stanford-university/

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 01 Nov 2017 13:48:53 -0400 2017-11-02T14:00:00-04:00 2017-11-02T15:00:00-04:00 East Hall Interdisciplinary QC/CM Seminars Workshop / Seminar East Hall
Thomas Devereaux: Light controlled topological phase transitions in multi-orbital and frustrated magnetic systems (November 2, 2017 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45081 45081-10478323@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 2, 2017 2:00pm
Location: East Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering

Spurred by recent progress in melting, enhancement and induction of electronic order out of equilibrium, a tantalizing prospect concerns instead accessing transient Floquet steady states via broad pump pulses, to affect electronic properties. Here, we consider a two-pronged approach to manipulate the topology of a band insulator, as well as topological order in a Mott insulator. We first consider monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) [1], and show that their low-energy description as massive 2D relativistic fermions fails to hold for optical pumping. Instead, the added complexity of a realistic materials description leads to a novel mechanism to optically induce topologically-protected chiral edge modes, facilitating optically-switchable conduction channels that are insensitive to disorder. We develop a strategy to understand non-equilibrium Floquet-Bloch bands and topological transitions directly from ab initio calculations, and illustrate for the example of WS2 that control of chiral edge modes can be dictated solely from symmetry principles and is not qualitatively sensitive to microscopic materials details. Second, we extend these ideas to strongly correlated systems and show that pumping frustrated Mott insulators with circularly-polarized light can drive the effective spin system across a phase transition to a chiral spin liquid (CSL) [2]. We show that the transient time evolution of a Kagome lattice Hubbard model is well captured by an effective spin description, where circular polarization promotes a staggered scalar spin chirality Si . (Sj x Sk) directly to the Hamiltonian level. We fingerprint the ensuing phase diagram and find a stable photo-induced CSL in proximity to the equilibrium ground state. The results presented suggest new avenues to marry dynamical symmetry breaking, strong interactions, and ab initio materials modelling, to access elusive phase transitions that are not readily accessible in equilibrium.

Bio: Professor Devereaux received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1991, M.S. from University of Oregon in 1988, and B.S from New York University in 1986.
Professor Devereaux is currently the Director of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), the Associate Lab Director (ALD) for Photon Science, a professor in the Photon Science Faculty at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University and a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 26 Sep 2017 11:33:00 -0400 2017-11-02T14:00:00-04:00 2017-11-02T15:00:00-04:00 East Hall Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering Workshop / Seminar Devereaux
Distinguished University Professorship Lecture | Networks of People, Places, and Information and What Physics Can Say About Them (November 2, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45857 45857-10318936@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 2, 2017 4:00pm
Location: Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.)
Organized By: Department of Physics

Many features of the world around us can be represented as networks. There are social networks of friendship or acquaintance, infrastructure networks like the internet or the power grid, transportation networks of roads, railways or airline flights, networks of information like the world wide web, and many others. This lecture will introduce some of the rich history of the study of networks and discuss some of the remarkable advances of the last few years, when a combination of insights from physics, the social sciences, biology, mathematics, and computer science have come together to shed light on issues as diverse as the spread of disease, online dating, scientific collaboration, animal behavior, web search, and the very structure of human society.

BIO
Mark Newman received a Ph.D. in physics from Oxford University in 1991 and conducted postdoctoral research at Cornell University before taking a position at the Santa Fe Institute, a think-tank in New Mexico devoted to the study of complex systems. In 2002 he left Santa Fe for the University of Michigan, where he is currently the Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics and a professor in the university's Center for the Study of Complex Systems. Among other honors, he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, he has been a Simon's Foundation Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and was winner of the 2014 Lagrange Prize, the largest international prize for research on complex systems. He is the author of over 150 scientific publications and seven books, including "Networks", an introduction to the field of network theory, and "The Atlas of the Real World", a popular book on cartography.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 20 Oct 2017 11:13:18 -0400 2017-11-02T16:00:00-04:00 2017-11-02T17:00:00-04:00 Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.) Department of Physics Lecture / Discussion Mark Newman
HET Seminars | New Directions in the Search for Dark Matter (November 3, 2017 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46336 46336-10464011@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 3, 2017 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

The existence of dark matter has been well established with overwhelming evidence, but its particle identity is still unknown. For more than three decades, significant theoretical and experimental efforts have been directed towards the search for a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), often overlooking other possibilities. The lack of an unambiguous positive WIMP signal, at both indirect- and direct-detection experiments and at the LHC, stresses the need to expand dark matter research into additional theoretical scenarios and, more importantly, to develop new experimental capabilities that go beyond the limitations of WIMP detection. In this talk I will shortly review the current status of the field and discuss new theoretical ideas and experimental avenues for searching for light dark matter in the MeV to GeV mass range, focusing on direct detection experiments.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 30 Oct 2017 08:46:12 -0400 2017-11-03T15:00:00-04:00 2017-11-03T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Saturday Morning Physics | The Machinery of Big Data Science (November 4, 2017 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/44527 44527-9923126@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, November 4, 2017 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

Science domains are generating ever-increasing amounts of data in fields from high-energy physics to earth science to medicine. This translates into significantly increasing challenges for scientists who need to access, transform, analyze and share this data to extract new scientific insights. Dr. McKee will describe these challenges and expose the underlying "hidden" machinery that has been developed to make data-intensive science possible.

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 21 Sep 2017 11:11:06 -0400 2017-11-04T10:30:00-04:00 2017-11-04T11:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Workshop / Seminar Weiser Hall
Special MIRA - U-M Physics Department Seminar | The Tragic Destiny of Mileva Marić Einstein (November 6, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46016 46016-10353059@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 6, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

What were Albert Einstein's first wife’s contributions to his extraordinary productivity in the first years of his career? A first biography of Mileva Marić was published in Serbian in 1969 but remained largely unknown despite being translated first in German, then in French in the 1990’s. The publication of Mileva and Albert’s love letters in 1987 brought more information but more recently, two very well documented publications shed even more light on Mileva Marić’s life and work. I will review this evidence in its social and historical context to give a better idea on her contributions. The audience will be able to appreciate why such a talented physicist has been so unkindly treated by history.

About the Speaker:
Pauline Gagnon was born in Chicoutimi in Quebec, Canada in 1955. She received a B.Sc. in Physics from Université du Québec à Montréal in 1978 and taught physics for six years in local colleges. After moving to California, she first obtained a Masters degree at San Francisco State University then completed a PhD in particle physics at the University of California in Santa Cruz in 1993. She joined a research team from Carleton University in Ottawa to conduct research at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics located near Geneva. She later became Senior Research Scientist at Indiana University until she retired in 2016. She contributed to the construction of a tracking device for the ATLAS detector, and searched for dark matter particles in the decays of Higgs bosons and in the form of hypothetical particles called dark photons.

From 2011 until 2014, she worked within the CERN Communication group, writing blogs for the Quantum Diaries and answering questions from numerous media worldwide. Explaining particle physics in simple and accessible terms has become her trademark. Since 2013, she has given more than 80 presentations to large audiences in eight countries on three continents. Her popular science book Who Cares about Particle Physics: Making Sense of the Higgs boson, the LHC and CERN goes beyond the current research program at CERN, looking at how research is done by large international teams and exploring the importance of fundamental research in physics. With this book, she hopes to reach even larger audiences, being convinced that particle physics is too much fun to leave it only to physicists!

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 23 Oct 2017 14:11:38 -0400 2017-11-06T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-06T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Opportunities in Layered Correlated Materials (November 7, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42191 42191-9584879@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, November 7, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Correlated materials is one of the central themes in the development of condensed matter physics because of their rich physics such as superconductivity and quantum magnetism. The correlated materials associated with layered structure are even more interesting because of their unique quasi-two-dimensionality. In this talk, I will discuss the discovery, synthesis and characterization of two novel layered correlated materials: the strong spin-orbit coupled IrTe_2 and spin jammed (Sr,Ba)Cr_{9p}Ga_{12-9p}O_{19}.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 07 Nov 2017 18:16:16 -0500 2017-11-07T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-07T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Seminars | Searching for weakly-coupled particles: from stars to colliders (November 8, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46529 46529-10543995@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 8, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

Many theories of beyond Standard Model physics include new light, weakly-coupled particles, which can be challenging to search for experimentally. I will talk about two observational probes of such particles. The first is based on “stellar cooling”: if new particles are produced in the hot cores of stars, they can escape from the star and carry away energy, affecting its structure and evolution. I’ll describe how the plasma environment in stellar cores can parametrically alter the rates for these process, and how this can significantly change the constraints and discovery potential for some new particle candidates.

I will also discuss searches for light vectors at colliders. Unless these couple to a fully conserved SM current, the production rate for longitudinal modes is enhanced by (energy / vector mass)^2. This is true even if the current is only broken at loop level, as for anomalous vectors, and can result in significantly improved constraints on many models of phenomenological interest.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 06 Nov 2017 10:55:41 -0500 2017-11-08T12:00:00-05:00 2017-11-08T13:00:00-05:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | Force from Non-Equilibrium Fluctuations in QED and Active Matter (November 8, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42553 42553-9611966@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 8, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The pressure of a gas, the van der Waals attraction between molecules, and the Casimir force in quantum electrodynamic (QED) are classical examples of forces resulting from equilibrium (thermal or quantum) fluctuations. Current research on "Active Matter" studies collective behaviors of large groups of self-driven entities (living or artificial), whose random motions superficially resemble thermally fluctuating particles. However, the absence of time reversal symmetry leads to unusual phenomena such as directed (ratchet) forces, and a pressure that depends on the shape and structure of the confining wall.

Some manifestations of QED fluctuations out of thermal equilibrium are well-known, as in the Stefan-Boltzmann laws of radiation pressure and heat transfer. These laws, however, acquire non-trivial twists in the near-field regime of sub-micron separations, and in the proximity of moving surfaces. I will discuss dissipation in moving steady states, and the non-Gaussian fluctuations of a particle in a quantum bath.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 08 Nov 2017 18:16:17 -0500 2017-11-08T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-08T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Saturday Morning Physics | Gravitational Wave Memory (November 11, 2017 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/44536 44536-9923127@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, November 11, 2017 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

Gravitational waves stretch and squeeze space as they pass by; but even after the wave has completely passed, space does not return to its old unstretched and unsqueezed state. This residual stretch and squeeze is called gravitational wave memory.

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:52:29 -0400 2017-11-11T10:30:00-05:00 2017-11-11T11:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Workshop / Seminar Weiser Hall
Quantitative Biology | Real-Time Imaging of Single mRNA Translation Dynamics in Living Cells (November 13, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46306 46306-10432697@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 13, 2017 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

We are developing technology to image single RNA translation dynamics in living cells. Using high-affinity antibody-based probes, multimerized epitope tags, and single molecule microscopy, we are able to visualize and quantify the emergence of nascent protein chains from single premarked RNA1. Here, I'll describe this technology as well as a two color extension useful for comparing translation rates between two different parts of a single open reading frame (ORF) or two different ORFs. Using information from the correlations of fluorescence fluctuations, we can accurately quantify single mRNA translation elongation rates in both tagged and untagged portions of ORFs. By transiently loading probes and reporter DNA into cells in a combinatorial fashion, multiplexed imaging of gene expression is possible. Preliminary application of this technology to the study of viral frameshifting will be discussed.

Timothy J. Stasevich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Colorado State University (CSU). His lab uses a combination of advanced fluorescence microscopy, genetic engineering, and computational modeling to study the dynamics of gene regulation in living mammalian cells. Most recently, his lab has pioneered the imaging of real-time single mRNA translation dynamics in living cells [1]. Dr. Stasevich received his B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Michigan, Dearborn, and his Ph. D. in Physics from the University of Maryland, College Park. He transitioned into experimental biophysics as a post-doctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Dr. James G. McNally at the National Cancer Institute. During this time, he developed technology based on fluorescence microscopy to help establish gold-standard measurements of live-cell protein dynamics. Dr. Stasevich next moved to Osaka University, where he worked with Dr. Hiroshi Kimura as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Foreign Postdoctoral Research Fellow. While there, he helped create technology to image endogenous proteins and their post-translation modifications in vivo. This allowed him to image the live-cell dynamics of epigenetic histone modifications during gene activation for the first time [2]. Before joining the faculty at CSU, Dr. Stasevich took a one year hiatus at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus, where he further improved the spatio-temporal resolution of endogenous protein imaging in live-cells.

1. Morisaki, T. et al. Real-time quantification of single RNA translation dynamics in living cells. Science 352, 1425–1429 (2016).

2. Stasevich, T. J. et al. Regulation of RNA polymerase II activation by histone acetylation in single living cells. Nature 516, 272–275 (2014).

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 13 Nov 2017 18:16:44 -0500 2017-11-13T12:00:00-05:00 2017-11-13T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Methods and Challenges in Searches for Continuous Gravitational Wave Signals (November 13, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46427 46427-10489736@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 13, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Recently, LIGO has made great strides in detecting gravitational waves produced by the coalescence of black holes and neutron stars. Nonetheless, a major target of LIGO observations remains elusive: continuous waves from fast-spinning, galactic neutron stars. We outline a few of the techniques used to search for these signals, and detail the challenges such searches present.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 13 Nov 2017 18:16:44 -0500 2017-11-13T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-13T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Mind the Gap: a Cascade of Instabilities Created by Rotating Beads Near a Floor (November 14, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45392 45392-10167095@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, November 14, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Does a rotating bead always spin in place? Not if that bead is near a surface: rolling leads to translational motion, as well as very strong flows around the bead, even quite far away. These flows strongly couple the motion of nearby microrollers (rotating beads), which leads to a rich variety of collective effects. Using experiments in tandem with large-scale 3D simulations, we have shown that driving a compact group of microrollers leads to a new kind of flow instability, whose wavelength is controlled not by the driving torque or the fluid viscosity, but a geometric parameter: the microroller's distance above the container floor. Furthermore, under the right conditions, stable, compact clusters we term "critters" can emerge from the unstable interface. Our simulations and experiments suggest that these critters are a stable state of the system, move much faster than individual rollers, and quickly respond to a changing drive. We believe that critters are unique in that they are clusters which form only with hydrodynamic interactions; no interparticle potentials are needed to create these structures. Furthermore, as compact, self-assembled structures which can easily be remotely guided, critters may offer a promising tool for microscopic transport.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 14 Nov 2017 18:16:07 -0500 2017-11-14T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-14T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | The Physics and Applications of 2D and 3D Organic Heterojunctions (November 15, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44699 44699-9968979@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 15, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Recently, we introduced a comprehensive theory of carrier recombination and energy transport at organic and hybrid organic/inorganic semiconductor heterojunctions (OI-HJ).[1] The OI-HJ has been found to play an important role in numerous devices in photodetection and energy power conversion. By developing a quantum mechanical model of the hybrid charge transfer exciton (HCTE) that is the intermediate between exciton generation and charge collection, we have been successful in understanding the behavior of several organic/III-V semiconductor OI-HJs.[2] More recently, we have extended this analysis to quantify the behavior of a new class of OI-HJs: those comprising a very thin film organic layered on a 2D transition metal dichalcogenide monolayer. For this latter purpose, we have fabricated an organic/WS2 OI-HJ photodetector used to elaborate the charge and energy transport across these limited dimensional systems.[3] In this talk, we will discuss the theoretical framework of HCTE dynamics, along with measurement of its properties and its application to photodetection and other optoelectronic systems consisting of combinations of excitonic and conventional semiconductors.

[1] C. K. Renshaw and S. R. Forrest, "Excited State and Charge Dynamics of Hybrid Organic/Inorganic Heterojunctions. I. Theory," Phys. Rev. B, vol. 90, p. 045302, 2014.
[2] A. Panda, K. Ding, and S. R. Forrest, "Free and trapped charge transfer excitons at a ZnO/small molecule heterojunction," Phys. Rev. B, vol. 94, p. 125429, 2016.
[3] X. Liu, J. Gu, K. Ding, D. Fan, X. Hu, Y.-W. Tseng, et al., "Photoresponse of an Organic Semiconductor/Two-Dimensional Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Heterojunction," Nano Lett., vol. 17, p. 3176, 2017.


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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 15 Nov 2017 18:16:22 -0500 2017-11-15T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-15T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Life After Grad School Seminar | Science Communication as a Career Path (November 17, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46226 46226-10421227@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 17, 2017 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

José Francisco Salgado is an astronomer (BS in Physics, Univ. of Puerto Rico; PhD in Astronomy, Univ. of Michigan), experimental photographer, visual artist, and public speaker who uses the arts to communicate science in engaging ways. He graduated from U-M with his mind set on Education and Public Outreach. During his tenure at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, he worked in the development of web resources, Spanish-language programming, scientific visualization, exhibit galleries, and stereoscopic (3D) shows. He also co-developed and hosted an astronomy news section on TV (Univision Chicago, WGBO) for which he received an Emmy nomination.

Nowadays, he serves as the Executive Director of KV 265, a non-profit science and arts education organization he co-founded in 2010. Through KV 265, Dr. Salgado collaborates with orchestras, composers, and musicians to produce and present multimedia works that provoke curiosity and a sense of wonder about the Earth and the Universe.

As an experimental photographer, Salgado has visited more than 30 scientific sites around the world and has contributed visuals to documentaries produced for the History, Discovery, BBC, and National Geographic channels. As a public speaker, he has given presentations about science and art in all seven continents, including a presentation at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Leveraging his skills as a photographer, he leads tours to Northern Canada to view and photograph the aurora borealis.

Dr. Salgado will speak about his career path and how he ended up combining the disciplines that have fascinated him from an early age: astronomy, music, and photography; all with the simple and personal mission of inspiring people to learn more.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 17 Nov 2017 18:16:05 -0500 2017-11-17T12:00:00-05:00 2017-11-17T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Cosmology of a Fine-Tuned SUSY Higgs (November 17, 2017 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46738 46738-10592253@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 17, 2017 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

I will discuss some work in progress that explores whether a mildly fine-tuned Higgs boson, as in (mini-)split supersymmetry, can have interesting or observable cosmological consequences. As moduli fields oscillate, the Higgs can respond and temporarily acquire very large values along a D-flat direction. Possible consequences include a burst of gravitational wave production and an altered estimate of the number of e-folds of inflation.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 13 Nov 2017 08:19:26 -0500 2017-11-17T15:00:00-05:00 2017-11-17T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Saturday Morning Physics | In Awe of the Northern Lights (November 18, 2017 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/44537 44537-9923128@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, November 18, 2017 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

Since 2012 astronomer and U-M alumnus José Francisco Salgado has been photographing the Northern Lights from Canada, Alaska, and Iceland, as part of his work of communicating science through the arts. So far, his Northern Lights films set to music have been presented with orchestras in 13 cities in four countries and have reached a combined audience of 130,000 people. In this lecture, Dr. Salgado will speak about the physical processes behind the mesmerizing auroras and the experience of photographing them from subarctic Canada twice a year.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 13 Nov 2017 16:18:20 -0500 2017-11-18T10:30:00-05:00 2017-11-18T11:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Workshop / Seminar Salgado Picture
HEP-Astro Seminar | Probing the Growth of Structure Using Clusters of Galaxies (November 20, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46827 46827-10647792@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 20, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

We discuss the growth of cosmic structure as constrained using galaxy clusters from the 2500 deg2 South Pole Telescope SZ survey. The current sample contains 377 uniformly selected cluster candidates with Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect detection significance greater than five and redshift z>0.25. Of these, 89 also have Chandra X-ray data, and 32 have deep optical follow-up data used to measure the weak gravitational lensing shear. This multi-wavelength data set extends up to z~1.7, and allows for unique tests of astrophysics and cosmology beyond redshift 1.

In this talk, we will discuss the multi-wavelength analysis of the SPT-SZ cluster sample, simultaneously constraining cluster scaling relations and cosmology. After reviewing past and current results, we will discuss the next steps in the SPT cluster cosmology effort which will allow for even more powerful measurements of structure growth. These steps involve incorporating more weak lensing mass calibration data from different ground- and space-based facilities such as the Dark Energy Survey or the Hubble space telescope, as well as data from the next generations of CMB surveys.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 20 Nov 2017 18:16:05 -0500 2017-11-20T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-20T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Special Cosmology Seminar | Quantum Theory and Cosmology away from the Planck Regime (November 21, 2017 3:10pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46897 46897-10670076@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 3:10pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: Department of Physics

We will review the so called “measurement problem” in quantum theory and argue that it becomes exacerbated in the cosmological context, and see how this connects with some problematic aspects of the standard accounts for the inflationary origin of cosmic structure.
We will argue that new physics, possibly tied to novel aspects of quantum gravity, should be invoked if we want to fully justify the phenomenological success of the basic inflationary scheme. The general view is one that has been strongly advocated by R. Penrose and we will discuss
how that can possibly be accommodated within our current understanding of the interface of quantum theory and gravitation.
We will then see, in particular that, such view leads to a modified outlook to that presented by the standard treatments, regarding the famous and yet undetected primordial tensor modes.
We will end with a proposal, motivated by the preceding discussion, of a novel approach to dealing with the so called “dark energy” puzzle.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 17 Nov 2017 13:20:53 -0500 2017-11-21T15:10:00-05:00 2017-11-21T16:00:00-05:00 Randall Laboratory Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Thanksgiving Week - No Seminar (November 21, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42192 42192-9584880@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

CM-AMO Seminar

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 15 Aug 2017 12:16:16 -0400 2017-11-21T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-21T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Data-Driven Models 
of the Milky Way 
in the Gaia Era (November 27, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46938 46938-10703012@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 27, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The Gaia satellite will soon deliver magnitudes, parallaxes, and proper motions of billions of stars, offering an unprecedented detailed view of the structure and dynamics of our Galaxy. Correctly exploiting Gaia is challenging due to the colossal amount of data, the complicated selection effects and noise, and the inaccuracy of current stellar and 3D Galactic models with respect to the precision of the data. I will demonstrate how those issues can be addressed with modern statistical methods, specifically hierarchical data-driven probabilistic models, which allow us to bridge the gap between the statistical power of the data and the physics of interest. I will showcase results obtained from the first Gaia data release, including precise models of the color-magnitude diagram, red-clump stars, and unresolved double and triple systems, and discuss upcoming data releases and the prospects of constructing detailed three-dimensional models the Galaxy.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 27 Nov 2017 18:16:06 -0500 2017-11-27T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-27T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Optical Studies of Current-Induced Magnetization and Photonic Quantum States (November 28, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42193 42193-9584881@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, November 28, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The ever-decreasing size of electronic components is leading to a fundamental change in the way computers operate, as at the few-nanometer scale, resistive heating and quantum mechanics prohibit efficient and stable operation. One of the most promising next-generation computing paradigms is Spintronics, which uses the spin of the electron to manipulate and store information in the form of magnetic thin films. I will present our optical studies of the fundamental mechanisms by which we can efficiently manipulate magnetization using electrical current. Although electron spin is a quantum-mechanical property, Spintronics relies on macroscopic magnetization and thus does not take advantage of quantum mechanics in the algorithms used to encode and transmit information. For the second part of my talk, I will present our work under the umbrella of new computing and communication technologies based on the quantum mechanical properties of photons. Quantum technologies often require the carriers of information, or qubits, to have specific properties. Photonic quantum states are good information carriers because they travel fast and are robust to environmental fluctuations, but characterizing and controlling photonic sources so the photons have just the right properties is still a challenge. I will describe our work towards enabling quantum-physics-based communication and computation using photons.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 28 Nov 2017 18:16:09 -0500 2017-11-28T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-28T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag | Dark Fires in the Sky: Model-Independent Dark Matter Detection via Kinetic Heating of Neutron Stars (November 29, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47036 47036-10776986@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 29, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

I present a largely model-independent probe of dark matter-nucleon interactions. Accelerated by gravity to relativistic speeds, local dark matter scattering against old neutron stars deposits kinetic energy at a rate that heats them to infrared blackbody temperatures. The resulting radiation is detectable by next generation telescopes such as James Webb and the Thirty Meter Telescope. While underground direct detection searches are not (or poorly) sensitive to dark matter with sub-GeV masses, higher-than-weak-scale masses, scattering with strong cross-sections, scattering below neutrino floors, spin-dependent per-nucleon scattering below per-nuclear cross-sections, velocity-dependent scattering, and inelastic scattering for inter-state transitions exceeding O(100 keV), the (non-)observation of dark kinetic heating of neutron stars should advance these frontiers by orders of magnitude. Popular dark matter candidates previously suspected elusive, such as the thermal Higgsino, may be discovered.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 27 Nov 2017 08:14:02 -0500 2017-11-29T12:00:00-05:00 2017-11-29T13:00:00-05:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Let's Talk About It: Mental Health in Academia (November 29, 2017 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46913 46913-10675586@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 29, 2017 2:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Research in Astrophysics

Note: Refreshments will be served in Room 337 following the talk

Abstract
Mental health struggles are often equated with personal weakness or deficiency, rather than an illness, in society at large and particularly within academia. This has led to a stigma around mental health and little meaningful discussion of the significant effects it can have on happiness, productivity, and overall health. Recent studies have shown that large fractions of people working at universities are at risk of having ordeveloping mental illness, and that graduate students are especially susceptible due to the great demands on their time, high expectations, and little control over the direction of their work and/or job prospects. In this talk I will present results from some of these studies, and I will also share my personal journey with mental health struggles. I will conclude with recommendations for what we can do as a community to help break the silence surrounding mental health and make academia a more supportive and inclusive environment.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Astronomy

About the Speaker

Johanna grew up in Central Pennsylvania, with a farm field at the end of her street. This meant she was lucky enough to have relatively dark skies, and found inspiration watching meteor showers ​​in the early morning hours, although she also enjoyed creek-walking, writing short stories, and pretending to be a spy. Johanna got her B.S. degree in Physics in 2008 from American University in Washington, DC, and then went to graduate school at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, where she got her Ph.D. in Astronomy in 2014. For the first two years of her Carnegie Origins Postdoctoral Fellowship she lived in Washington, DC and worked at the Carnegie Department of Terrestrial Magnetism before moving to Pasadena in August 2016 to work at the Carnegie Observatories. In her free time Johanna likes teaching astronomy to others (and learning from them!), watching baseball, and running marathons.

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Presentation Sat, 18 Nov 2017 14:06:52 -0500 2017-11-29T14:00:00-05:00 2017-11-29T15:00:00-05:00 West Hall Michigan Institute for Research in Astrophysics Presentation Johanna Teske
Department Colloquium | The Universe at One Second after the Big Bang (November 29, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42554 42554-9611967@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 29, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The Universe is dynamical and has expanded by a factor of over one billion between the present-day and the early thermal epoch known as the neutrino decoupling. The production of relic neutrinos is within seconds of the inflation and heating processes that imprinted the seeds of future structure formation in the Universe. These early universe relics have cooled under the expansion of the Universe and are sensed indirectly through the action of their diminishing thermal velocities on large-scale structure formation. Experimental advances have opened up new opportunities to directly detect the CNB, an achievement which would profoundly confront and extend the sensitivity of precision cosmology data. PTOLEMY is a novel method of 2D target surfaces, fabricated from Graphene, that has unique directional detection capabilities for MeV dark matter and forms a basis for a future large-scale relic neutrino detector. The discussion of PTOLEMY focusses on experimental challenges, recent developments and the path forward to discovery sensitivity.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 29 Nov 2017 18:16:16 -0500 2017-11-29T16:00:00-05:00 2017-11-29T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
A Nobel Symposium (November 30, 2017 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46388 46388-10475471@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 30, 2017 1:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: The Center for the Study of Complex Systems

Six U-M scholars discuss the work, impact, and personality of one of this year's 6 Nobel laureates. U-M English professor Peter Ho Davies on the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (literature); U-M-Dearborn biological chemistry professor Michael Cianfrocco on Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, & Richard Henderson (chemistry); U-M information professor Erin Krupka on Richard Thaler (economic sciences); U-M mathematics professor Daniel Forger on Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash, & Michael Young (physiology or medicine); U-M political science professor Barbara Koremenos on the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (peace); and U-M physics professor Keith Riles on Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, & Kip Thorne (physics).

This event will be held on the 10th floor of the newly renovated Weiser Hall.


Come for one or come for all. Here is the Schedule:


1:10PM WELCOME & OPENING REMARKS - Charlie Doering
1:15PM LITERATURE Peter Ho Davies, English Language and Literature
2:00PM CHEMISTRY Michael Cianfrocco, Life Sciences, BioChem, Med School
2:45PM ECONOMIC SCIENCES Erin Krupka, School of Information
3:30PM MEDICINE & PHYSIOLOGY Daniel Forger, Mathematics, Med & Bioinformatics
4:15PM PEACE Barbara Koremenos, Political Science
5:00PM PHYSICS Keith Riles, Physics

This event is free and open to the public.

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Conference / Symposium Mon, 27 Nov 2017 13:45:41 -0500 2017-11-30T13:00:00-05:00 2017-11-30T17:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall The Center for the Study of Complex Systems Conference / Symposium Poster for Nobel Symposium
Stephen Forrest: ECE Bicentennial + Beyond Lecture Series (November 30, 2017 3:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45616 45616-10240173@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 30, 2017 3:30pm
Location: Gerald Ford Library
Organized By: Electrical and Computer Engineering

Steve Forrest is an internationally-renowned researcher, educator, and entrepreneur. His research focuses on photovoltaic cells, organic light emitting diodes, and lasers & optics.
As an alumnus from Michigan with his MSc and PhD degrees in Physics, he joined the faculty at USC in 1985, and in 1992, he became the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, where he served as Department Chair from 1997-2001. In 2006, he rejoined the University of Michigan as Vice President for Research.

He has received the IEEE/LEOS Distinguished Lecturer Award, the IPO National Distinguished Inventor Award, the Thomas Alva Edison Award, the MRS Medal, the IEEE/LEOS William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award, the Jan Rajchman Prize, the IEEE Daniel Nobel Award, and the IEEE Jun-Ichi Nishizawa Medal. Forrest is a Fellow of the APS, IEEE and OSA and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors.

Forrest has authored ~580 papers in refereed journals and has 307 patents. He is co-founder or founding participant in several companies, including Sensors Unlimited, Epitaxx, Inc., NanoFlex Power Corp. (OTC: OPVS), Universal Display Corp. (NASDAQ: OLED) and Apogee Photonics, Inc., and is on the Board of Directors of Applied Materials. He is past Chairman of the Board of the University Musical Society, and past Chairman of the Board of Ann Arbor SPARK. Forrest serves as Lead Editor of Physical Review Applied.
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This talk is given as part of the ECE Bicentennial + Beyond Lecture Series. This series of talks features world-renowned faculty with a long history at Michigan. These distinguished faculty will talk about their research, their careers, and the future of technology in their areas.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 01 Nov 2017 11:48:53 -0400 2017-11-30T15:30:00-05:00 2017-11-30T16:30:00-05:00 Gerald Ford Library Electrical and Computer Engineering Lecture / Discussion Stephen Forrest
Thermal equivariance and its applications (December 1, 2017 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46739 46739-10592254@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 1, 2017 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

I will describe how techniques from topological field theory and equivariant cohomology find a role in physical problems. I will define the notion of thermal equivariance which will involve gauging thermal diffeomorphisms, and argue that these constructions naturally lead to entropy being interpretable as a Noether current. I will outline an application to constructing dissipative hydrodynamic effective actions, reproducing previously known facts about the admissible constitutive relations.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 10 Nov 2017 14:32:16 -0500 2017-12-01T15:00:00-05:00 2017-12-01T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Saturday Morning Physics | Atomic Sensors: An Emerging Quantum Technology (December 2, 2017 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/44538 44538-9923129@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, December 2, 2017 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

Advances in our ability to study and exploit the properties of atoms for measurements of physical quantities has ushered in a new age of technological possibilities in quantum sensing and measurement. Seminal developments include atomic clocks, atomic magnetometers, and inertial sensors based on atom interferometry. This lecture will introduce the advent of new quantum technologies for sensing and measurements of electric fields based on using exquisitely sensitive and versatile atoms in highly-excited Rydberg states. Dr. Anderson will describe the new atomic sensor technologies under development at Rydberg Technologies LLC, from basic measurement principles to applications in metrology, RF engineering, and plasma science.

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:59:15 -0400 2017-12-02T10:30:00-05:00 2017-12-02T11:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Workshop / Seminar Weiser Hall
RNA in Neuroscience (December 4, 2017 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47180 47180-10810944@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, December 4, 2017 3:00pm
Location: Taubman Biomedical Science Research Building
Organized By: Center for RNA Biomedicine

David Turner, Ph.D.
Associate Research Professor & Associate Professor
Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute & Dept. of Biological Chemistry

“microRNAs, microRNA targets, and neuron formation during mammalian retinal development”

and

Robert Thompson, Ph.D.
Research Associate Professor, Psychiatry and Research Associate Professor, Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute

“Regulation of the astrocyte transcriptome”

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 30 Nov 2017 10:27:47 -0500 2017-12-04T15:00:00-05:00 2017-12-04T16:00:00-05:00 Taubman Biomedical Science Research Building Center for RNA Biomedicine Lecture / Discussion flyer
HEP-Astro Seminar | Searches for New Physics Through Third Generation Particles at the ATLAS Detector (December 4, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42194 42194-9584882@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, December 4, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The Standard Model (SM) has been central to particle physics for decades, and its success in predicting observational results has culminated in the 2012 discovery of a Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. However, the theory is considered 'not natural', requiring finely-tuned parameters to allow for the precise cancellation of large radiative corrections to the Higgs boson mass. In pursuit of a more natural theory, extensions to the SM have been proposed that would stabilize the Higgs boson mass and resolve the hierarchy problem (supersymmetry, extended Higgs sectors, models with vector-like quarks). This presentation will focus on several ATLAS searches for new physics involving third generation particles, both targeting extended Higgs sectors and vector-like quarks.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 04 Dec 2017 18:16:11 -0500 2017-12-04T16:00:00-05:00 2017-12-04T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Playing with Photons in Flatland: Controlling Light and Matter in Two-Dimensional Materials (December 5, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42195 42195-9584883@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, December 5, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The discovery of monolayer two-dimensional semiconductors of atomic-scale thickness presents a new two-dimensional landscape in which to play with the interaction between light and matter. These nanomaterials at the extreme limit of surface-to-volume ratio exhibit rich optical phenomenology such as layer dependent bandgaps and degenerate, but distinct, valley-polarized excitonic states. The unique features of atomically-thin materials suggest that these layered systems can be exploited to achieve new regimes of light-matter interactions. In this presentation, I will discuss efforts to control the interaction of monolayer semiconductors with light using both top-down nanopatterning and photonic device integration. In particular, I will describe the emergence of spin-polarized exciton-polariton quasi-particles in monolayer semiconductors embedded in a photonic microcavity. Cavity enhancement of optical interactions results in modified dynamics of these coherent light-matter states. Examples will illustrate how optical and quantum phenomena can be rationally designed in monolayer semiconductors, suggesting exciting potential for novel hybrid quantum systems or opto-electronic applications harnessing the unique properties of low-dimensional nanomaterials.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 05 Dec 2017 18:16:10 -0500 2017-12-05T16:00:00-05:00 2017-12-05T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Seminar | From higher spins to generalized SYK models (December 6, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46737 46737-10592252@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, December 6, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

The spectrum of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model consists of an infinite tower of operators, which resembles the spectra of various vector models that are holographically dual to higher spin gravity theories. In this talk, I will discuss a direct connection between SYK-like tensor models and the Gross-Neveu vector model. This is achieved by studying a toy model where a tensor field is coupled with some vector fields. By integrating out the tensor field, the toy model reduces to the Gross-Neveu model in 1 dimension. At a different corner of the moduli space of this toy model, a perturbation can be turned on and the toy model flows to an SYK-like model at low energy. In addition, a chaotic-nonchaotic phase transition is observed as the sign of the perturbation is altered. If time permitted, I will briefly discuss some aspects of supersymmetric SYK-like models.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 04 Dec 2017 08:35:51 -0500 2017-12-06T12:00:00-05:00 2017-12-06T13:00:00-05:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | Structure and Dynamics with Ultrafast Electron Microscopes … or how to make atomic-level movies of molecules and materials (December 6, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/43295 43295-9751017@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, December 6, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

In this talk I will describe how combining ultrafast lasers and electron microscopes in novel ways makes it possible to directly 'watch' the time-evolving structure of condensed matter on the fastest timescales open to atomic motion. By combining such measurements with complementary (and more conventional) spectroscopic probes one can develop structure-property relationships for materials under even very far from equilibrium conditions.

I will give several examples of the remarkable new kinds of information that can be gleaned from such studies and describe how these opportunities emerge from the unique capabilities of the current generation of ultrafast electron microscopy instruments. For example, in diffraction mode it is possible to identify and separate lattice structural changes from valence charge density redistribution in materials on the ultrafast timescale and to identify novel photoinduced phases that have no equilibrium analogs. It is also possible to directly probe the strength of the coupling between electrons and phonons in materials across the entire Brillouin zone and to probe nonequilibrium phonon dynamics (or relaxation) in exquisite detail. In imaging mode, real space pictures of nano- to microstructural evolution in materials at unprecedented spatio-temporal resolution can be obtained.

I will assume no familiarity with ultrafast lasers or electron microscopes.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 06 Dec 2017 18:16:30 -0500 2017-12-06T16:00:00-05:00 2017-12-06T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
2017 Nelson W. Spencer Lecture (December 8, 2017 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46830 46830-10647795@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 8, 2017 3:00pm
Location: Chrysler Center
Organized By: Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering

The Climate & Space 2017 Nelson W. Spencer Lecturer will be Professor Margaret Kivelson, of the U-M Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at UCLA.

Professor Kivelson will present a lecture titled, "Magnetic Structures in the Solar System."

Directly following the lecture, Professor Margaret Kivelson and her daughter, Professor Valerie A. Kivelson, Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at U-M LSA, will discuss Prof. Margaret Kivelson's long career in the space sciences.

Reception to follow. Please join us!

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 22 Nov 2017 16:02:53 -0500 2017-12-08T15:00:00-05:00 2017-12-08T17:00:00-05:00 Chrysler Center Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering Lecture / Discussion Spencer Lecture invitation
HET Seminar | Effective field theories for dark matter direct detection (December 8, 2017 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47257 47257-10855068@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 8, 2017 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

I will discuss the nonperturbative matching of the effective field theory describing dark matter interactions with quarks and gluons to the effective theory of nonrelativistic dark matter interacting with nonrelativistic nucleons. In general, a single partonic operator already matches onto several nonrelativistic operators at leading order in chiral counting. Thus, keeping only one operator at the time in the nonrelativistic effective theory does not properly describe the scattering in direct detection. Moreover, the matching of the axial--axial partonic level operator, as well as the matching of the operators coupling DM to the QCD anomaly term, naively include momentum suppressed terms. However, these are still of leading chiral order due to pion poles and can be numerically important. I will illustrate the impact of these effects with several examples. Finally, I will comment about the importance of renormalization group running in direct dark matter detection.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 04 Dec 2017 08:40:24 -0500 2017-12-08T15:00:00-05:00 2017-12-08T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Surveying the Landscape of DUNE (December 11, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47067 47067-10782623@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, December 11, 2017 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

DUNE is an ambitious international program aiming for discovery in neutrino oscillation physics as well as in searches for nucleon decay and studies of neutrinos from core-collapse supernovae. The central elements of the experimental platform that will enable this program include a new, high-intensity neutrino beam line that will be constructed at Fermilab and a suite of massive liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPC's) to be deployed deep underground in the former Homestake gold mine, now home to the Sanford Underground Research Facility, in Lead, South Dakota. I will describe the scientific context in which DUNE sits, talk about several aspects of technology development for DUNE including work toward efficient detection of scintillation photons in large-volume LArTPC's, and summarize the status and outlook for DUNE.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 11 Dec 2017 18:16:12 -0500 2017-12-11T16:00:00-05:00 2017-12-11T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
First Step Sessions (December 14, 2017 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47537 47537-10942726@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, December 14, 2017 12:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for Global and Intercultural Study

In order to participate in a CGIS program, you must attend a session where you will learn about programs around the world, scholarships and other financial aid resources, the CGIS application process, courses in your major, and credit transfer. Additional sessions will be held the first two weeks of school from 12-12:30pm in Suite 255, Weiser Hall.

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Meeting Tue, 12 Dec 2017 15:49:11 -0500 2017-12-14T12:00:00-05:00 2017-12-14T12:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Center for Global and Intercultural Study Meeting FirstStep
Quantitative Biology Seminar | Geometric Singular Perturbation Theory and the Mathematical Description of Enzyme Kinetics (January 8, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48107 48107-11180649@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, January 8, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Due to the prevelance of fast and slow timescales in enzyme-catalyzed reactions, geometric singular perturbation theory (GSPT) plays a pivotal role in the mathematical illustration of enzyme kinetics. I’ll begin the talk by reviewing some of the earlier work that characterizes single-enzyme/single-substrate (SE/SS) reactions. At the same time, I’ll introduce some of the principal theorems of GSPT and demonstrate their applicability to SE/SS reactions. Finally, I’ll conclude with a description of my current work on coupled reactions. Coupled reactions generally consist of multiple fast timescales and multiple slow timescales; thus, they serve as a novel platform from which to study the applicability of GSPT in higher dimensional dynamical systems.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 08 Jan 2018 18:16:06 -0500 2018-01-08T12:00:00-05:00 2018-01-08T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | The Fermilab Muon g-2 Experiment (January 8, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48014 48014-11170143@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, January 8, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The magnetic moment anomaly of the muon, g-2, can be measured with sub ppm precision and can challenge the Standard Model prediction. In fact the most recent measurement, Brookhaven E821, reveals a 3-4 sigma discrepancy with the SM prediction. A new effort at Fermilab using the Brookhaven storage ring magnet will provide 20 times more muons over two years, which, combined with a number of technical advances, is expected to provide a factor of 4 improvement of the combined statistical and systematic error. Production data collection will commence in January, 2018, and E821-level statistics should be acquired in a few months. In this talk, I will set the stage and describe the eclectic experimental effort that brings together expertise in accelerator physics, particle physics, nuclear physics, atomic physics and precision measurement.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 08 Jan 2018 18:16:06 -0500 2018-01-08T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-08T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Optimal sensors in random environments (January 9, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/47739 47739-11004725@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, January 9, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: The Center for the Study of Complex Systems

** note location change to 411 West Hall **

Abstract: The efficient coding hypothesis has revolutionized theoretical neuroscience. I would argue that its next-generation instantiation is best understood using rate-distortion theory. I use rate-distortion theory to inspire a simple model of sensory adaptation. In randomly drawn, fluctuating environments, this model explains the absence of sensory neurogenesis and predicts that biological sensors are poised to just barely confuse ``minimal confounds'' in the environment.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 05 Jan 2018 15:47:10 -0500 2018-01-09T11:30:00-05:00 2018-01-09T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall The Center for the Study of Complex Systems Workshop / Seminar Sarah Merzen headshot
CM-AMO Seminar | Control of Topological Defects in Liquid Crystals (January 9, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42196 42196-9584884@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, January 9, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Among the many physical systems that form topological defects, liquid crystals are special because their characteristic topological defects are easy to visualize and manipulate. Many strategies can be employed to manipulate topological defects in these fluids with long-range order, either by external fields, or by choosing an appropriate topography of the confining surfaces, or dispersing colloidal particles in liquid crystals. Through combinations of these strategies, it is possible to generate defect arrays which then can be used for optics or to promote self-assembly of colloidal particles. I will discuss the behavior of a colloidal particle in liquid crystals next to an undulated surface, and the case of focal conic defects in smectic liquid crystals that can be assembled on curved interfaces to form an array of micro-lenses. I will also discuss defect arrays in nematic liquid crystals driven by electrical fields, which can form large, regular and reconfigurable structures.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 09 Jan 2018 18:16:09 -0500 2018-01-09T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-09T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Seminars | Simplified Limits on Resonances at the LHC (January 10, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48219 48219-11191402@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, January 10, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

When an excess appears in LHC data, we should compare the results with broad classes of models, to get an immediate sense of which kinds of BSM theories could conceivably be relevant. Often, the new physics is likely to be an s-channel resonance. In this case, a simplified model of the resonance can translate an estimated signal cross section into bounds on the product of the dominant production and decay branching ratios. This quickly reveals whether a given class of models could possibly produce a signal of the required size at the LHC. This talk will outline a general framework and show how it operates for resonances of varying widths and with different numbers of production and decay modes. It will also discuss applications to cases of experimental interest, including resonances decaying to di-bosons, di-leptons, or di-jets. If the LHC experiments start reporting searches for BSM resonances in terms of the simplified limits variable ζ defined here, the community will home in more quickly on the models most likely to explain any observed excess.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 05 Jan 2018 12:22:25 -0500 2018-01-10T12:00:00-05:00 2018-01-10T13:00:00-05:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | Promoting Gender Equity in STEM: Theory and Applications (January 10, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47573 47573-10953044@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, January 10, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

This presentation will begin by briefly reviewing data on the current status of women in STEM disciplines: degrees earned, careers pursued, obstacles encountered. Next, it will draw on social science research to illuminate a variety of underlying causes for gender disparities in STEM. These, in turn, will be shown to suggest an array of concrete actions that individual scientists, group leaders, and institutions can take to improve gender diversity; a few that the speaker has found especially effective in her academic leadership roles will be noted. While the primary focus of the talk will be on women in physics, some of the broader issues encountered by sexual and gender minorities in STEM will also be discussed. In the remainder of the presentation, two particular interventions in which the speaker has been involved for the past several years will be covered in more detail: one aimed at building career skills of women physicists in developing nations and the other aimed at improving the climate for LGBT physicists here in the United States. These illustrate the wide array of opportunities open to all of us for making STEM fields more inclusive.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 10 Jan 2018 18:16:15 -0500 2018-01-10T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-10T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Learning from nature: biomimetic mechanisms for new materials (January 11, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/47824 47824-11015165@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, January 11, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: The Center for the Study of Complex Systems

Biological structures exhibit a level of complexity, functionality, and hierarchy that, if fully understood at a mechanistic level, could usher in the next generation of complex designer materials. For example, biological hydrogels act as selective permeability barriers by filtering nano-scale particles based on size as well as biochemical and biophysical interactions. However, for a class of situations that includes the Nuclear Pore Complex, the mechanism of this filtering has proven challenging to untangle because large non-binding particles are caged by the surrounding polymer network while binding particles exhibit increased, not decreased, mobility. We present an equilibrium mechanism for this counter-intuitive filtering strategy that does not require energy consumption. We show that selective mobility can be achieved and controlled in a simple crosslinked polymer gel by coupling binding to crosslink dynamics. Our results lead to specific design rules for manufacturing complex selective gels and could help explain how the Nuclear Pore Complex attains selectivity.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 02 Jan 2018 12:50:44 -0500 2018-01-11T11:30:00-05:00 2018-01-11T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall The Center for the Study of Complex Systems Workshop / Seminar Carl Goodrich Headshot
HET Semiars | SIMPs and ELDERs: New Ideas for Dark Matter (January 12, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48218 48218-11191401@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 12, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

Dark Matter could reside in a hidden sector with gauge structure similar to the Standard Model. In particular, the hidden sector may include a non-Abelian gauge interaction with confinement scale around 100 MeV, similar to our QCD. Dark mesons, counterparts of the usual pions, kaons etc., can then play the role of dark matter. Such particles may experience strong number-changing self-interactions, similar to the 2K<->3pi scattering familiar in QCD. Intriguingly, such self-interactions can naturally produce a thermal relic abundance of dark mesons consistent with observations. In this talk we will explore two variations of this basic scenario, “Strongly-Interacting Massive Particle” (SIMP) and “Elastically-Decoupling Relic” (ELDER). We will discuss the basic features of each scenario, explicit models in which they may be realized, and their experimental signatures.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 05 Jan 2018 12:20:09 -0500 2018-01-12T15:00:00-05:00 2018-01-12T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Marjorie Lee Browne Colloquium: Hidden Figures: Bringing Math, Physics, History, and Race to Hollywood (January 15, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47715 47715-11002093@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, January 15, 2018 4:00pm
Location: East Hall
Organized By: Department of Mathematics

Abstract:
In January 2017, the movie Hidden Figures was released by 20th Century Fox studios. This movie tells the story of three African-American women mathematicians and engineers (Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan) who would play a pivotal role towards the successful mission of John Glenn’s spacecraft orbit around the Earth and the NASA missions to the moon.

For this talk, we give a brief review of the space race going on at the time between the United States of America and the former Soviet Union. We will discuss the lives and contributions that NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson and the NASA engineers Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan made to the space race. In particular, their work as concerns John Glenn’s orbit around the Earth in 1962 and to the moon missions. Also, we will talk about the experiences of being a mathematical consultant for this film. (This talk was designed and originally to be presented by Professor Rudy Horne, who passed away in December 2017. Professor Washington kindly agreed to present in his stead.)

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 18 Dec 2017 14:08:05 -0500 2018-01-15T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-15T17:00:00-05:00 East Hall Department of Mathematics Lecture / Discussion Taraji P. Henson & Rudy Horne
Thermodynamic limits far from equilibrium. (January 16, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/47967 47967-11159791@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, January 16, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: The Center for the Study of Complex Systems

Thermodynamics is a remarkably successful theoretical framework, with wide ranging applications across the natural sciences. Unfortunately, thermodynamics is limited to equilibrium or near-equilibrium situations, whereas most of the natural world, especially life, operates very far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Without a robust nonequilibrium thermodynamics, we cannot address a whole host of pressing research questions regarding the energetic requirements to operate outside of equilibrium, like the energetic cost to form a pattern, replicate an organism, or sense an environment, to name a few. Cutting-edge research in nonequilibrium statistical thermodynamics is beginning to shed light on these questions. In this talk, I will present two such recent predictions. The first is a novel linear-response-like bound that quantifies how dissipation shapes fluctuations far from equilibrium. Besides its intrinsic allure as a universal relation, I will discuss how it can be used to probe the energetic efficiency of molecular motors, offer energetic constraints on chemical clocks, and bound the dissipation in complex materials, both biological and synthetic, allowing us to gain insight into the fundamental energetic requirements to operate out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The second is an extended second law of thermodynamics with information that quantifies the precise energetic costs to process information, which I will apply to the energetic requirements of sensory adaptation in E. coli.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 02 Jan 2018 13:47:25 -0500 2018-01-16T11:30:00-05:00 2018-01-16T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall The Center for the Study of Complex Systems Workshop / Seminar Jordan Horowitz
CM-AMO Seminar | Transistors without Semiconductors by Functionalized Boron Nitride Nanotubes (January 16, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48613 48613-11256986@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, January 16, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Miniaturization of silicon field effect transistors (FETs) is encounter with various fundamental limitations, including i) high power consumption due to leakage in the semiconducting channels; ii) short channel effects as the conduction length approaches the scale of the depletion layer width, and iii) high contact resistance at the semiconducting channels. The development of nano FETs by various nanowires (NWs), and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are still hindered by surface defects and difficulty in controlled synthesis of semiconducting CNTs, respectively.

Apparently, beyond the box approaches should be explored to overcome the above mentioned limitations. Here we discuss about creation of transistors and electronic switches without semiconductors. Furthermore, these devices are based on quantum tunneling, potentially bypass most if not all the above mentioned limitation. Specifically, we will discuss about room temperature tunneling FETs by metallic quantum dots functionalized boron nitride nanotubes (QDs-BNNTs) [1]. These QDs-BNNTs can also be designed for use in flexible electronics [2]. Finally, graphene-BNNTs heterojunctions are also created to convert metallic graphene into digital switches [3]. All these results are made possible after the success in controlled synthesis of high-quality BNNTs by catalytic chemical vapor deposition (CCVD) [4-6].

This work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Office of Basic Energy Sciences (DOE-BES Grants DEFG0206ER46294, and DESC0012762). Part of this work was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (Projects CNMS-2009213 and CNMS-2012083), which is sponsored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) by the DOEBES Scientific User Facilities Division, and by ORNL’s Shared Research Equipment (ShaRE) User Program.

References:
[1] C. H. Lee et al, Adv Mat 25, 2544 (2013).
[2] B. Hao et al, Sci Rep 6, 20293 (2016).
[3] V. Parashar et al, Sci Rep 5, 12238 (2015).
[4] (Review) J. Wang et al, Nanoscale 2, 2028 (2010)
[5] (Review) B. Hao et al, Chapter 20 in Nanotubes and Nanosheets: Functionalization and Applications of Boron Nitride and Other Nanomaterials, (CRC Press) pp 551-572 (2015).
[6] (Review) S. Bhandari et al, Chapter 1 in Boron Nitride Nanotubes in Nanomedicine, (Elsevier) pp 116 (2016).

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 16 Jan 2018 18:16:16 -0500 2018-01-16T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-16T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Seminars | The strong CP problem and UV instantons (January 17, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48221 48221-11191405@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, January 17, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

The absence of sizeable CP violation in the strong sector is a long standing puzzle. A class of solutions to this problem rely on a global U(1) symmetry that is anomalous with QCD. These solutions lead to robust low-energy predictions, for example a massless up quark or a light axion. I will present simple extensions to such solutions which can dramatically change these low-energy predictions. In our models, contributions from small instantons play a significant role in affecting the low-energy physics while preserving the solution to the strong CP problem.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 05 Jan 2018 12:24:20 -0500 2018-01-17T12:00:00-05:00 2018-01-17T13:00:00-05:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | Implications and Challenges for the Application of Artificial Intelligence in Physics and in Society (January 17, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48332 48332-11222703@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, January 17, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The increased availability of large data sets and advancements in AI algorithms have revolutionized the role of data in both commercial industries and academic research. Today, AI permeates multiple industries, from self-driving vehicles and entertainment choices to cancer-detection and criminal justice. Moreover, in the last few years, it has had substantial impacts in molecular chemistry, particle physics, and more recently astronomy. AI, and it’s sub-fields, like machine learning, are more than likely here to stay. But, what are these algorithms really doing, and are they ethically implemented?

We'll discuss these topics, as well as the theory of deep learning, and its application to modern astronomical surveys, which are providing data sets that are unprecedented in size, precision, and complexity. Recent work with convolutional neural networks and strong gravitational lensing intimate the long-term potential for deep learning and its application to larger challenges in cosmology. However, AI is not without its own shortcomings. We'll discuss the barriers to deep learning having its highest impact on science.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 17 Jan 2018 18:16:20 -0500 2018-01-17T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-17T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
LCTP Inaugural Lecture | The Future of Fundamental Physics (January 18, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47892 47892-11043650@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, January 18, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.)
Organized By: Department Colloquia

Fundamental physics started the 20th century with the twin revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics, and much of the second half of the century was devoted to the construction of a theoretical structure unifying these radical ideas. Yet storm clouds are gathering, which point towards a new set of revolutions on the horizon in the 21st century. Space-time is doomed—how can it emerge from more primitive building blocks? And how is our macroscopic universe compatible with violent microscopic quantum fluctuations that seem to make its existence wildly implausible? In this talk I will describe these deep mysteries and outline some of our strategies for making progress on them. I will also discuss plans for a giant new particle accelerator with energy seven times higher than the Large Hadron Collider that will be necessary to make major progress on at least some of these questions in the coming decades.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 15 Mar 2018 13:37:43 -0400 2018-01-18T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-18T17:00:00-05:00 Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.) Department Colloquia Lecture / Discussion Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.)
Science as Art Contest Submission Deadline (January 19, 2018 8:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48786 48786-11308870@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 19, 2018 8:00am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Arts at Michigan

Arts at Michigan, ArtsEngine and the Science Learning Center invite you to submit artwork to the 2020 Science as Art exhibition. University of Michigan undergraduate students are invited to submit artwork expressing a scientific principle(s), concept(s), idea(s), process(es), and/or structure(s). The artwork may be visual, literary, musical, video, or performance based. A juried panel using criteria based on both scientific and artistic considerations will choose winning submissions.

Deadline for submissions is Wednesday February 5th!

A number of submissions will be selected for prizes, some of which will be on display and/or performed during the Awards Ceremony and/or displayed in an online Contest Gallery. The entry selected for “Best Overall” will be awarded a cash prize, with smaller cash awards in other categories.

For full information, visit: tinyurl.com/scienceasart2020

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Exhibition Thu, 30 Jan 2020 11:47:29 -0500 2018-01-19T08:00:00-05:00 2018-01-19T23:59:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Arts at Michigan Exhibition Science as Art logo
HET Seminars | Marble Statues in the Forest Beyond Quantum Mechanics and Spacetime (January 19, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48023 48023-11170152@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 19, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

TBA

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 03 Jan 2018 14:16:44 -0500 2018-01-19T15:00:00-05:00 2018-01-19T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP - Astro Seminar | Cutting-Edge Instrumentation for the Advanced ACT Polarimeter (January 22, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49102 49102-11375486@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, January 22, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HEP - Astro Seminars

In this talk I will present an overview of the upgrade to the polarization-sensitive camera on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope known as Advanced ACTPol (AdvACT). This upgrade targets ambitious science goals using advanced technologies including dense arrays of cryogenic bolometers with superconducting sensors and continuously-rotating silicon-metamaterial half-wave plates for modulation of incoming polarization. I will discuss work on the detector arrays, advances in our understanding of our bolometers, and the data processing pipeline under development to handle polarization-modulated data.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 22 Jan 2018 13:31:34 -0500 2018-01-22T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-22T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall HEP - Astro Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Optimizing self-assembly kinetics for biomolecules and complex nanostructures. (January 23, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/47712 47712-11002092@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, January 23, 2018 11:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: The Center for the Study of Complex Systems

Abstract:
In a heterogeneous system, such as a large biomolecule or complex nanostructure, there is no guarantee that the lowest-free-energy state will form via self-assembly. Defects and mis-interactions among subunits often arise during a self-assembly reaction, particularly when these systems comprise many distinct components. As a result, if we wish to assemble complex nanostructures reliably, we need to design robust kinetic pathways to the target structures. I shall describe a theoretical approach for predicting self-assembly pathways in both engineered nanostructures and natural biomolecules. First, I shall discuss design principles that can be used to tune the nucleation and growth rates of colloidal nanostructures, with implications for achieving low-defect self-assembly and designing time-dependent experimental protocols. Then, turning to biological examples of kinetic optimization, I shall discuss how analogous principles have shaped the evolution of variable ribosome translation rates in order to optimize the folding of nascent proteins.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 18 Dec 2017 11:51:43 -0500 2018-01-23T11:30:00-05:00 2018-01-23T13:00:00-05:00 Weiser Hall The Center for the Study of Complex Systems Workshop / Seminar headshot
CM-AMO Seminar | Exact Results in NMR (January 23, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42198 42198-9584886@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, January 23, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

After a short introduction to NMR technique, a brief, three-part survey of recent NMR studies on solid-state materials will be presented. These studies are each underpinned by an exact theoretical result that leads to a possibly approximate, but reliable basis for interpretation of experimental data. The first example is the behavior of nuclear spin-lattice relaxation in two of the high-Tc materials vis-a-vis inelastic neutron scattering (INS) studies that evaluate the dynamic susceptibility chi”(q,omega)*. Such a comparison shows that a substantial amount of intensity for chi” is simply missing from currently available INS data. The other two examples feature NMR studies of the stoichiometric QCP compound YbRh2Si2. In the first of these, NMR shows that high-quality crystals of this system enter into a macroscopic two-state admixture of non-Fermi-liquid and Fermi-liquid phases**. Such a result is not accessible with bulk measurements. In the second example, quantitative measurements of indirect spin-spin couplings exhibit a temperature dependence revealing modifications of the Fermi Surface with temperature***. To our knowledge, none of the results described has any precedent in the NMR literature.

* R. E. Walstedt, T. E. Mason, G. Aeppli, S. M. Hayden, H. A. Mook, Phys. Rev. B84, 024530 (2011).
** S. Kambe, H. Sakai, Y. Tokunaga, G. Lapertot, T. D. Matsuda, G. Knebel, J. Flouquet, R. E. Walstedt, Nat. Phys. 10, 840 (2014).
*** S. Kambe, H. Sakai, Y. Tokunaga, T. Hattori, G. Lapertot, T. D. Matsuda, G. Knebel, J. Flouquet, R. E. Walstedt, Phys. Rev. B95, 195121 (2017).

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 23 Jan 2018 18:16:32 -0500 2018-01-23T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-23T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Weighing Neutrinos (January 24, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47838 47838-11025470@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, January 24, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The mass of the neutrino has been an elusive quantity physicists have tried to measure since the very inception of the particle. The most sensitive direct method to establish the absolute neutrino mass is observation of the endpoint of the tritium beta-decay spectrum. A lower bound of iis set by observations of neutrino oscillations, while the KATRIN Experiment -- the current-generation tritium beta-decay experiment that is based on Magnetic Adiabatic Collimation with an Electrostatic (MAC-E) filter -- will achieve a sensitivity of better than 250 meV. Project 8 is a new experiment that uses Cyclotron Radiation Emission Spectroscopy (CRES) to probe much of the unexplored neutrino mass range with greater resolution. In this talk, I will review the current status of these two experiments (KATRIN and Project 8) as they seek to finally measure the mass of the neutrino.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 24 Jan 2018 18:16:29 -0500 2018-01-24T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-24T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Life After Graduate School Seminar | From grad school to Goldman Sachs: What PhDs are doing in Finance (and how to get there) (January 26, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49012 49012-11345061@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, January 26, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

It is no secret that banks and financial institutions hire PhDs from quantitative fields to fill their ‘quant’ positions. However pretty much everything else about the job can be a mystery. What do quants do? Why do they need PhDs? What is life like working as a quant? Will I like the role? How do I apply and get the position?

All of the above (and more) were a mystery to me a year ago. I will try to shed some light by drawing from my own experience transitioning from Physics grad student into modeling/data-science role at Goldman Sachs. I will give a short introduction to the Market Risk Modeling team and why we are looking for PhDs (yes, we are hiring*). Following that is a free Q&A sessions where you can ask me anything about working in Finance.

* Candidates interested to apply for intern/full-time are encouraged to bring their resume or find us at the Engineering Career Fair on Wed, Jan 24.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 26 Jan 2018 18:16:41 -0500 2018-01-26T12:00:00-05:00 2018-01-26T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Mesoscale Theory and Modeling of Polymer-Based Nanocomposites (January 30, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42199 42199-9584887@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, January 30, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Polymer-inorganic nanocomposites – materials in which inorganic nanoscale inclusions (“fillers”) are added to a polymer host (“matrix”) – are of great interest for many industrial applications. The physical and mechanical properties of nanocomposites depend crucially on our ability to design and control their morphology, i.e., the arrangement of the particles in the matrix. The nanocomposite morphologies depend on a number of factors, such as the size and shape of the fillers, the molecular weight and composition of the matrix polymer, and the interactions between the filler and the matrix. In most cases, the interaction between the matrix and the filler is very unfavorable, leading to aggregation of the filler particles and poor mechanical or physical properties. To counter this effect, in recent years, filler particles are being functionalized by oligomeric ligands covalently bonded to particle surfaces. These “hairy” nanoparticles can organize into complex soft-crystalline 3d, 2d, or 1d structures. We develop a mesoscale field theory (combination of Self-Consistent Field Theory for polymers and Density Functional Theory for particles) to describe the nanocomposite morphologies. Two specific examples are considered. In the first case, we investigate the arrangements of organically modified (“hairy”) spherical nanoparticles dispersed in a polymer matrix. Depending on the particle volume fraction, ligand grafting density, and ligand/matrix polymer molecular weight ratio, we find structures such as 3d-aggregates, 2d-sheets, and 1d-strings. Those results are in a good qualitative agreement with earlier experiments (P. Akcora et al., Nature Materials 2009) and simulations. The second example is the case of single-component nanocomposites (“hairy” nanoparticles with no matrix). Here, again, we find various structures, from 3d FCC crystals to 2d sheets to 1d lamellae. These predictions are also in good qualitative agreement with experimental results and particle-based simulations of Glotzer and co-workers (R. Marson et al., MRS Communications 2015). These findings demonstrate that field-based mesoscale simulations are going to play important role in designing new polymeric and polymer-based nanocomposite materials.

I received my B.S. (Physics) and Ph. D. (Polymer Physics) from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (“FizTech”), Moscow, Russia, with Ph.D. thesis on “Modeling the Dynamics and Thermodynamics of Melting Polyethylene Crystals” (advisor Prof. Leonid I. Manevitch). After moving to the US in 1992, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado (1993-97, advisor Prof. Noel A. Clark) and the University of Pittsburgh (1998-2000, advisor Prof. Anna C. Balazs). In early 2001, I joined Corporate R&D of The Dow Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan, where I am currently a Senior Research Scientist. My research interests are in applied theoretical and computational polymer science, with specific emphasis on polymer-inorganic nanocomposites, polyurethane foams and elastomers, directed self-assembly of block copolymers, and other applications of polymer theory to predict structure-property relationships in industrially relevant systems. I am a Fellow of American Physical Society (2014), and recipient of Dow internal award for Excellence in Science (2015).

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 30 Jan 2018 18:16:40 -0500 2018-01-30T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-30T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Seminars | Astrophysical Signatures of Dark Matter Accumulation in Neutron Stars (January 31, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49364 49364-11450939@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, January 31, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

Over the past few decades, terrestrial experiments have placed increasingly strong limits on the dark matter-nucleon scattering cross-section. However, a significant portion of the standard dark matter parameter space remains beyond our reach. Due to their extreme density and huge gravitational fields, neutron stars stand as optimal targets to probe dark matter-neutron interactions. As an example, over the last few years, the existence of Gyr-age neutron stars has placed strong limits on models of asymmetric dark matter. In this talk, I will discuss novel methods which utilize neutron stars to potentially detect dark matter interactions by studying the galactic morphology of neutron stars, as well as electromagnetic signals which may be produced via neutron star collapse. Intriguingly, these observations can probe extremely generic dark matter models spanning from MeV - PeV energies, and including troublesome portions of parameter space such as pure-Higgsino dark matter.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 29 Jan 2018 08:29:24 -0500 2018-01-31T12:00:00-05:00 2018-01-31T13:00:00-05:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | The Dark Matter in the Universe (January 31, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48333 48333-11222704@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, January 31, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

"What is the Universe made of?" This question is the longest outstanding problem in all of modern physics, and it is one of the most important research topics in cosmology and particle physics today. The bulk of the mass in the Universe is thought to consist of a new kind of dark matter particle, and the hunt for its discovery in on. I'll start by discussing the evidence for the existence of dark matter in galaxies, and then show how it fits into a big picture of the Universe containing 5% atoms, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy. Neutrinos only constitute ½% of the content of the Universe, but much can be learned about neutrino properties from cosmological data. Leading candidates for the dark matter are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), axions, and sterile neutrinos. WIMPs are a generic class of particles that are electrically neutral and do not participate in strong interactions, yet have weak-scale interactions with ordinary matter. There are multiple approaches to experimental searches for WIMPS: at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva; in underground laboratory experiments; with astrophysical searches for dark matter annihilation products, and upcoming searches with the James Webb Space Telescope for Dark Stars, early stars powered by WIMP annihilation. Current results are puzzling and the hints of detection will be tested soon. At the end of the talk I'll briefly turn to dark energy and its effect on the fate of the Universe.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 31 Jan 2018 18:16:35 -0500 2018-01-31T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-31T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Life After Graduate School Seminar | PANEL: Faculty search: the view from applicants and hiring committee (February 2, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49404 49404-11453745@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 2, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Three faculty members (Henriette Elvang, Ben Safdi, and Liuyan Zhao) will discuss and take questions about the process of applying for faculty jobs and how the faculty search committee works.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 02 Feb 2018 18:16:40 -0500 2018-02-02T12:00:00-05:00 2018-02-02T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | String Theory of Supertubes (February 2, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49365 49365-11450940@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 2, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

The internal structure of extremal and near-extremal black holes in string theory involves a variety of ingredients — strings and branes — that lie beyond supergravity, yet it is often difficult to achieve quantitative control over these ingredients in a regime where the state being described approximates a black hole. The supertube is a brane bound state that has been proposed as a paradigm for how string theory resolves black hole horizon structure. This talk will describe how the worldsheet dynamics of strings can be solved exactly in a wide variety of supertube backgrounds, opening up the study of stringy effects in states near the black hole transition.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 29 Jan 2018 08:31:40 -0500 2018-02-02T15:00:00-05:00 2018-02-02T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | The Mu2e Experiment: A Search for Charged Lepton Flavor Violation (February 5, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49079 49079-11375461@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 5, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The Mu2e experiment in Fermilab will search for the charged-lepton flavor violating (CLFV) coherent neutrinoless conversion of a muon into an electron in the field of an aluminum nucleus, a key process in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model. This measurement will improve sensitivity by 4 orders of magnitude over existing limits, presenting a rare opportunity for an indirect probe of new physics beyond the reach of current or planned high energy colliders. To achieve a single conversion event sensitivity better than 3e-17 the experiment requires a very intense muon beam and a high precision measurement of the ~105 MeV/c conversion electron momentum, while reducing to negligible all background contributions in the signal window. The measurement strategy, the detector design, and the current experimental status will be presented in this talk.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 05 Feb 2018 18:16:18 -0500 2018-02-05T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-05T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Deformed exponential families in Statistical Physics and beyond (February 6, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/49180 49180-11386616@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 6, 2018 11:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: The Center for the Study of Complex Systems

Two recent developments are discussed from the point of view, expressed by Jaynes in 1957, that Statistical Physics is statistics applied to physics. 1. Information geometry aims to replace the maximum likelihood method of statistics by a geometric approach. Many of the techniques involved sound familiar to physicists because they are used in classical mechanics, relativity, or thermodynamics. 2. The study of deformed exponential families started with the non-extensive statistical physics of Tsallis. New classes of statistical models will hopefully find application in many areas of research. A short presentation is given of the formalism of phi-deformed exponential families and their dual rho-tau geometries.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 05 Feb 2018 11:17:23 -0500 2018-02-06T11:30:00-05:00 2018-02-06T13:00:00-05:00 Weiser Hall The Center for the Study of Complex Systems Workshop / Seminar Jan Naudts Seminar Flyer
CM-AMO Seminar | On the Emergence of Coulomb Forces: a quest for a rigorous version of QED (February 6, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42200 42200-9584888@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 6, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The possibility is investigated that Coulomb forces are emergent forces. More precisely, the hypothesis is that Coulomb forces are carried by transversely polarized photons. Omission of the longitudinal and scalar photons removes some of the difficulties of standard QED. The second modification is the introduction of reducible representations of the canonical commutation and anti-commutation relations. Its main effect is that integrations over the wave vectors are postponed to the moment of evaluation of expectation values. In this way the problem of ultraviolet divergences becomes manageable. An overview of the theory is presented and some experimental consequences are discussed.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 06 Feb 2018 18:16:19 -0500 2018-02-06T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-06T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Seminars | Loops from Nodes: Two-Loop Supergravity Amplitudes From the Ambitwistor String (February 7, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49369 49369-11450943@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 7, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

The last years have seen remarkable progress in understanding the scattering amplitudes of massless particles in arbitrary dimensions.Underlying the simple formulae are chiral worldsheet models, known as Ambitwistor Strings. While correlators of these models admit a conventional genus expansion of the worldsheet, the amplitudes actually localize on the maximal non-separating degeneration. We explore this simplification at two loops for type II supergravity, concluding in several observations for generic massless field theories.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 29 Jan 2018 08:55:36 -0500 2018-02-07T12:00:00-05:00 2018-02-07T13:00:00-05:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | Production, Acceleration and Transport of Future Electron Beams (February 7, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49635 49635-11487519@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 7, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Bright electron beams enable electron microscopy, brilliant X-ray sources, and collisions that probe the interactions of elementary particles. They are also essential for semiconductor device fabrication, the sterilization of medical equipment and the production of heat shrink tubing and tires. Achieving increased brightness and extending the scientific and industrial reach of these beams poses basic scientific questions about beam production, acceleration and transport, whose answers will require expertise spanning disciplines from ab initio physics, materials science, surface chemistry, and mathematics to accelerator physics. A new NSF Science and Technology Center, the Center for Bright Beams, has been formed to do exactly this. The colloquium will present some of the key scientific questions involved in producing and using future bright beams and Center for Bright Beams early results.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 07 Feb 2018 18:16:25 -0500 2018-02-07T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-07T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Saturday Morning Physics | The Physics of Complex Systems (February 10, 2018 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48126 48126-11180721@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, February 10, 2018 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

This talk will describe how we use ideas from physics to understand a wide range of complex systems, including traffic patterns, random processes, social networks, and the spread of diseases. Using a combination of computer simulations, math, and experimental observations, physics can shed light on questions as diverse as why traffic jams occur, how coral grows, or how the flu spreads around the world.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 12 Jan 2018 13:22:00 -0500 2018-02-10T10:30:00-05:00 2018-02-10T11:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Lecture / Discussion Newman
Quantitative Biology Seminar | Synthetic Human Embryology in a Dish (February 12, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49553 49553-11476262@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 12, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Most of our current knowledge of mammalian embryology is derived from studies of the mouse embryo. However, mammalian development involves substantial divergence in the mechanism and order of cell-fate allocations among species, and there has been a critical lack of information regarding human development due to the scarcity of human embryo specimens. Recent studies from my laboratory and others have shown that under suitable culture conditions human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) can undergo intricate morphogenetic events and self-organize to form patterned human embryo-like structures in vitro. These synthetic human embryo-like structures have sparked great interests in using such human development models for advancing human embryology, embryo toxicology, and reproductive medicine. In this talk, I will first discuss our effort in developing a micropatterned hPSC-based neuroectoderm developmental model, wherein pre-patterned geometrical confinement induces emergent patterning of neuroepithelial (NE) and neural plate border (NPB) cells, mimicking neuroectoderm regionalization during early neurulation. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss our work in developing a hPSC-based, synthetic embryological model of human post-implantation development that recapitulates multiple embryogenic events including amniotic cavity formation, amnion-epiblast patterning, and primitive streak formation. Together, our studies provide novel insight into previously inaccessible but critical embryogenic events in human development. Continuous development of these human development models will provide synthetic embryological platforms that open up previously inaccessible phases of the human life cycle to experimental study.

Jianping Fu is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with a primary appointment in the Mechanical Engineering Department and courtesy appointments in the Biomedical Engineering Department and the Cell and Developmental Biology Department. He also serves as the Associate Director for the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care (MCIRCC). Dr. Fu’s research interests lie at the nexus of bioengineering, biophysics, and biology. Specifically, his research group integrates micro/nanoengineering, single-cell technologies, and systems and synthetic biology methods with new discoveries of mechanobiology, epigenetics, and stem cell biology for advancing understanding of human development and cancer biology. Dr. Fu is the recipient of the American Heart Association Scientist Development Award (2012), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2012), the Mechanical Engineering Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award (2014), the Robert M. Caddell Memorial Award for Research (2014), the Ted Kennedy Family Team Excellence Award (2015), the Rising Star Award from Biomedical Engineering Society - Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (2016), and the George J. Huebner, Jr. Research Excellence Award (2018). Dr. Fu's research group is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, and some other foundations and agencies.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Feb 2018 18:16:19 -0500 2018-02-12T12:00:00-05:00 2018-02-12T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HEP-Astro Seminar | Computationally Probing Large Scale Structures (February 12, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49816 49816-11543715@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 12, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

As understood today, the history of our universe can be described with six parameters. We can constrain these parameters by measuring patterns in the large scale structure of our universe, which are governed by the competition between gravitational collapse and the accelerated expansion of our universe. The most massive collapsed structures are clusters of galaxies, comprised of hundreds to thousands of galaxies. For galaxy clusters, the telltale cosmological pattern is simply their number count as a function of mass and time. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges in using galaxy clusters as a probe for cosmology. We address these challenges through computational methods that explore galaxy formation processes such as energy feedback from active galactic nuclei, synthetic observations of the superheated plasma that permeates galaxy clusters, and methods that automate aspects of pattern-recognition.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Feb 2018 18:16:19 -0500 2018-02-12T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-12T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Quantum Nano-Photonic Devices Based on Rare-Earth Ions (February 13, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42201 42201-9584889@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 13, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Quantum light-matter interfaces that reversibly map photonic quantum states onto atomic states, are essential components in the quantum engineering toolbox with applications in quantum communication, computing, and quantum-enabled sensing. I present a new platform for on-chip quantum light-matter interfaces based on nanophotonic resonators coupled to rare-earth-ions in crystals. The rare-earth ions exhibit long coherence times on optical transitions, which makes them suitable for optical quantum memories. We demonstrate a high-fidelity nanophotonic quantum memory based on a mesoscopic neodymium ensemble coupled to a photonic crystal cavity. The nanocavity enables >95% spin polarization for efficient initialization of the atomic frequency comb memory, and time-bin-selective readout via enhanced optical Stark shift of the comb frequencies. Our current technology can be readily transferred to Erbium doped devices for telecom memories that can be integrated with silicon photonics. Besides ensemble memories, single rare-earth-ions coupled to nano-resonators can be used as single optically addressable quantum bits where the quantum state is mapped on their Zeeman or hyperfine levels with long coherence time. Our solid-state nano-photonic quantum light-matter interfaces can be integrated with other chip-scale photon source and detector devices for multiplexed quantum and classical information processing at the nodes of quantum networks. I also discuss prospects for integration with superconducting resonators and qubits, which can lead to devices for reversible quantum transduction of optical photons to microwave photons, thus enabling optical interconnects between superconducting quantum computers.

Biography: Dr. Andrei Faraon is an Assistant Professor of Applied Physics at California Institute of Technology. After earning a B.S. degree in physics with honors in 2004 at California Institute of Technology, he received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Applied Physics both from Stanford University in 2009. At Stanford, Dr. Faraon was involved with seminal experiments on quantum optics using single indium arsenide quantum dots strongly coupled to photonic crystal cavities in gallium arsenide. After earning his PhD, Dr. Faraon spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. At HP he was involved with pioneering experiments on diamond quantum photonic devices coupled to solid-state spins. He demonstrated the first nano-resonators coupled to single nitrogen vacancy centers in mono-crystalline diamond.

Faraon left HP in 2012 to become an Assistant Professor at Caltech, where he set up a laboratory specialized in developing nano-photonic technologies for devices that operate close to the fundamental limit of light-matter interaction. He is focused both on fundamental challenges on how to control the interaction between single atoms and single photons using nano-technologies, and on using nano-photonics to build cutting edge devices for imaging and sensing. He is the recipient of the 2015 National Science Foundation CAREER award, the 2015 Air Force Office of Scientific Research young investigator award and the 2016 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.


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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 13 Feb 2018 18:16:49 -0500 2018-02-13T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-13T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Series | The Quest for New Physics: From Atomic Physics to the LHC (February 14, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49947 49947-11608279@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

The Standard Model of particle physics well describes a vast number of observables up to the TeV scale. However, it cannot be a complete description of Nature as it cannot explain various experimental observations. For example, it lacks a viable dark matter candidate and can neither explain the observed matter/antimatter asymmetry of our Universe nor neutrino oscillations. Thus, physics beyond the Standard Model is well motivated. In this seminar, we explore different methods to probe new physics at multiple energy scales, from high energy colliders, such as the LHC, to precision low energy experiments. In particular, we focus on searches for new force carriers at the LHCb experiment and in precision atomic spectroscopy. We show that the inclusive search for dark photons at the LHCb experiment already probes new parameter space and can be easily interpreted for a large variety of new physics models. On the precision frontier, we explore the potential of isotope shift spectroscopy to probe new long range force carriers.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Feb 2018 08:19:16 -0500 2018-02-14T12:00:00-05:00 2018-02-14T13:00:00-05:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquia | Comb-Based Multidimensional Coherent Spectroscopy (February 14, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49956 49956-11608293@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

TBA

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Feb 2018 09:58:07 -0500 2018-02-14T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-14T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Department Colloquium | Comb-based Multidimensional Coherent Spectroscopy (February 14, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49901 49901-11569059@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Over the last 20 years, there have been two seemingly disconnected developments in optical spectroscopy: frequency combs and multidimensional coherent spectroscopy. Frequency combs revolutionized optical frequency metrology and enabled optical atomic clocks while multidimensional coherent spectroscopy became a powerful tool for studying dynamics on ultrafast time scales in atomic, molecular and solid-state systems. Inspired by a method known as "dual comb spectroscopy", we have recently combined these two developments by demonstrating comb-based multidimensional coherent spectroscopy, which leverages the best aspects of both.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 14 Feb 2018 18:16:56 -0500 2018-02-14T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-14T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Life After Graduate School Seminar | Physics in Finance (February 16, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48983 48983-11342268@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 16, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Modern finance offers numerous opportunities for those with advanced training in the natural sciences and mathematics: I found one such opportunity myself in 2010 and left academia for finance. Unfortunately it can be difficult to obtain reliable information about how to make the transition and what to expect on the other side. In my talk, I will draw from my own experiences and those of my colleagues to give you a sense of life in the quantitative financial world. I will survey the different sectors of the financial industry, the firms that inhabit them, the structure of financial markets, and asset categories. I will describe how to prepare for interviews and what to expect during the interview process, the skills that are generally required on the job, and a typical workday. Career transitions are deeply personal decisions, so I will talk about ethical issues and some points to ponder if you find yourself considering a move to finance.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 16 Feb 2018 18:16:52 -0500 2018-02-16T12:00:00-05:00 2018-02-16T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Universality and Thermalization of Fast Quenches (February 16, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49948 49948-11608280@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 16, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

Quantum quench - a sadden change of system Hamiltonian - provides a rich and tractable framework to access dynamics of thermalization of a quantum isolated system. When the chnge of Hamiltonian is fast but not instantaneous (so called fast quenches) the dynamics often can be described in terms of the UV fixed point, thus leading to universal predictions. We employ conformal perturbation theory to calculate the behavior of various quantities (one and two point functions) during and after the quench. Furthermore, by calculating the energy fluctuations after the quench we argue that at late times the system will thermalize, provided it satisfies the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Feb 2018 08:21:36 -0500 2018-02-16T15:00:00-05:00 2018-02-16T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Physics Palooza at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum (February 17, 2018 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/50165 50165-11656136@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, February 17, 2018 10:00am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Physics Workshops & Conferences

The University of Michigan Society of Physics Students and the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum are partnering to host the Physics Palooza which is a 2-day physics demonstration stage show for children of all ages.
Location: Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum, 220 E. Ann St., Ann Arbor, MI 41804
Ph: (734) 995.5439
https://www.aahom.org/

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Presentation Fri, 16 Feb 2018 12:06:58 -0500 2018-02-17T10:00:00-05:00 2018-02-17T17:00:00-05:00 Off Campus Location Physics Workshops & Conferences Presentation
Saturday Morning Physics | Detection for Nuclear Nonproliferation (February 17, 2018 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48127 48127-11180722@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, February 17, 2018 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

Since the discovery of fission, nuclear chain reactions, and nuclear weapons, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons has become a top priority for our nation and the world. Several international treaties have been put into place to curb the expansion of nuclear capabilities. Nevertheless, there are states that may be pursuing elements of an overt or covert nuclear weapons program. New science and technology developments are needed to verify the existing or proposed treaties in this area and to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used again.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 16 Feb 2018 11:41:51 -0500 2018-02-17T10:30:00-05:00 2018-02-17T11:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Lecture / Discussion Camera
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (February 19, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656627@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 19, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-02-19T14:00:00-05:00 2018-02-19T16:00:00-05:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
HEP-Astro Seminar | Interacting Dark Energy (February 19, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50042 50042-11625145@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 19, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The ultimate nature of dark matter and dark energy are fundamental questions in cosmology; these two sectors may well interact with each other and observational bounds allow interesting possibilities. Indeed, some interactions may help to resolve some observed tensions between high and low redshift probes of structure. I will discuss a class of models where the interactions take the form of pure momentum exchange and show how these can lead to a dark energy sound speed that deviates from unity.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 19 Feb 2018 18:16:51 -0500 2018-02-19T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-19T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (February 20, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656538@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 20, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-02-20T14:00:00-05:00 2018-02-20T16:00:00-05:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
CM-AMO Seminar | Sub-cycle Terahertz Microscopy Down to the Atomic Scale (February 20, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42202 42202-9584890@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 20, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics


A new experimental frontier has recently emerged with the potential to significantly impact physics, chemistry, materials science, and biology: the regime of ultrafast time resolution and ultrasmall spatial resolution. This is the domain in which single atoms, molecules, and electronic orbitals move. It also corresponds, on larger scales, to the territory of low-energy elementary excitations such as plasmons, phonons, and interlevel transitions in excitons. These processes are of particular importance for nanomaterial functionality. Moreover, they typically survive for only femtoseconds to picoseconds after photoexcitation and can evolve within a single oscillation period.

In this talk, I will show how these diverse dynamics can be studied with new techniques that combine terahertz technology with scanning probe microscopy. First, I will describe how ultrafast near-field microscopy has been employed to perform sub-cycle spectroscopy of single nanoparticles [1], reveal hidden structure in correlated electron systems [2], and resolve transient interface polaritons in van der Waals heterostructures [3]. Then, I will discuss the invention and development of a related technique: lightwave-driven terahertz scanning tunneling microscopy [4,5]. In this novel approach, the oscillating electric field of a phase-stable, few-cycle light pulse at a atomically sharp tip can be used to remove a single electron from a single molecular orbital within a time window faster than an oscillation cycle of the terahertz wave. I will show how this technique has been used to take ultrafast snapshot images of the electron density in single molecular orbitals and watch the motion of a single molecule for the first time [5].

[1] M. Eisele et al., Nature Photon. 8. 841 (2014).
[2] M. A. Huber et al., Nano Lett. 16, 1421 (2016).
[3] M. A. Huber et al., Nature Nanotech. 12, 207 (2017).
[4] T. L. Cocker et al., Nature Photon. 7, 620 (2013).
[5] T. L. Cocker et al., Nature 539, 263 (2016).

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 20 Feb 2018 18:16:52 -0500 2018-02-20T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-20T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Seminars | Quantum Curves and Q-deformed Painlevé Equations (February 21, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49953 49953-11608291@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

In this talk I will first review some aspects of Painlevé equations and their connection to four dimensional gauge theory; then I will generalise this construction to q-difference Painlevé equations and topological string theory. I will show that their tau-functions are Fredholm determinant of operators associated to quantum mirror curves on a corresponding geometry. As a consequence, the zeroes of these tau-functions compute the exact spectrum of the associated quantum integrable systems. I will focus on the particular example of q-Painlevé III_3 which is related to topological string on local P1xP1 and to relativistic Toda system.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Feb 2018 09:40:56 -0500 2018-02-21T12:00:00-05:00 2018-02-21T13:00:00-05:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (February 21, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656582@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-02-21T14:00:00-05:00 2018-02-21T16:00:00-05:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
Department Colloquium | Study the Cosmic Rays with the AMS Experiment on the International Space Station (February 21, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49976 49976-11611107@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) is a particle spectrometer on board of the International Space Station. It measures the charge, energy and momentum of charged cosmic rays with unprecedented precisions from 1GV to a few TV in rigidity. AMS has collected and analyzed more than 100 billion cosmic ray events during 6 years of operation since May 2011. In this talk we report the latest AMS measurements of the cosmic ray spectra of electron, positron, proton, antiproton, and light nuclei, including He, Li, Be, B, and C, O. Unexpected characteristics of the spectra are observed. They provide important new inputs for the study of fundamental physics as well as understanding the mechanism of cosmic ray acceleration and propagation.

Biosketch: Yuan-Hann Chang is a professor in the Physics Department of the National Central University, Chung-Li, Taiwan. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His professional interests are experimental particle physics. In the past 30 years, he participated particle experiments including L3, PHOBOS, and CMS, and astroparticle experiments NCT and AMS. He is currently a member of the AMS collaboration.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:16:50 -0500 2018-02-21T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-21T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Dark Matter Beyond Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (February 23, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50190 50190-11656403@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 23, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

Dark matter (DM) comprises approximately 27% of the energy in the observable universe. Its properties, such as its mass and interactions, remain largely unknown. Unveiling the properties of DM is one of the most important tasks in high energy physics. For the past few years, motivated by possible new physics at the electroweak scale, many DM experiments have looked for DM with mass at O(100) GeV. This is not the only possibility, however. Large chunks of parameter space supported by other well-motivated models remain to be carefully studied. Exploring these regimes requires creative ideas and advanced technologies. I will first talk about the novel proposal on using superconductor as the target material for DM direct detection. This setup has the potential to lower the direct detection mass threshold from few GeV to keV, consequently probing the warm dark matter scenario. Then I will present a recent proposal utilizing the Gravitational Wave (GW) experiments, i.e. LIGO and LISA, to search for ultra-light dark photon dark matter. We show these GW experiments can go well beyond existing constraints and probe large regions of unexplored parameter space. Both proposals are under serious investigation by experimental groups and likely to be carried out in the near future.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 16 Feb 2018 15:08:04 -0500 2018-02-23T15:00:00-05:00 2018-02-23T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (February 26, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656628@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, February 26, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-02-26T14:00:00-05:00 2018-02-26T16:00:00-05:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (February 27, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656539@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-02-27T14:00:00-05:00 2018-02-27T16:00:00-05:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
Spring Break - No Seminar (February 27, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42203 42203-9584891@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

CM-AMO Seminar

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 16 Aug 2017 12:16:11 -0400 2018-02-27T16:00:00-05:00 2018-02-27T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (February 28, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656583@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, February 28, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-02-28T14:00:00-05:00 2018-02-28T16:00:00-05:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
HEP-Astro Seminar | Hunting Dark Matter Axions and other Exotic Creatures (March 5, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49856 49856-11555016@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 5, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The nature of dark matter is one of the great mysteries of modern physics today and could be from new particles beyond the standard model. The Axion, originally conceived as a solution to the strong-CP problem in nuclear physics, is one well-motivated candidate. The Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX), a DOE Gen 2 project, uses a large microwave cavity immersed in a strong static magnetic field to resonantly convert dark matter axions to detectable photons. Recently ADMX has completed its first data run with unprecedented sensitivity in the classical QCD-axion mass range of several µeV. In addition, several new detection techniques have been proposed to cover a large span of potential axion masses beyond that of the classical window. In this talk I will describe the history of axion dark matter searches, describe the recent ADMX results and give a survey of the R&D efforts currently underway to explore the entire axion dark matter mass window.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 05 Mar 2018 18:16:17 -0500 2018-03-05T16:00:00-05:00 2018-03-05T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CM-AMO Seminar | Mesoscopic Optics (March 6, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42204 42204-9584892@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 6, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Random scattering of light, e.g., in paint, cloud and biological tissue, is a common process of both fundamental interest and practical relevance. The interference of multiply scattered waves leads to remarkable phenomena in mesoscopic physics such as Anderson localization and universal conductance fluctuations. In applications, optical scattering is the main obstacle to imaging or sending information through turbid media. Recent developments of adaptive wavefront shaping in optics enabled imaging and focusing of light through opaque samples. By selective coupling to high or low transmission eigenchannels, we varied the transmission of a laser beam through a highly scattering system by two orders of magnitude, and drastically changed the energy density distribution inside the system. Furthermore, we utilized the multiple scattering of light in a random structure to realize a chip-scale spectrometer. The speckle pattern is used as a fingerprint to recover an arbitrary spectrum. Such a spectrometer has good spectral resolution and wide frequency range of operation.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 06 Mar 2018 18:16:19 -0500 2018-03-06T16:00:00-05:00 2018-03-06T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Seminars | Holographic Mellin Amplitudes (March 7, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49954 49954-11608292@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 7, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

Holographic four-point functions are known for their notorious computational difficulties. In the past two decades, only a handful of them have been explicitly calculated using the standard algorithm. In this talk I will introduce modern methods to compute holographic correlators efficiently, which are inspired by the bootstrap philosophy and the on-shell methods of scattering amplitudes in flat space. I will show that by translating the problem into Mellin space many difficulties encountered when applying the traditional method are avoided. I will argue that imposing symmetry constraints and general consistency conditions -- avoiding all details of the complicated effective Lagrangian -- leads to many novel results for holographic four-point functions in AdS5×S5, AdS7×S4 and AdS4×S7. I will conclude by outlining some interesting future directions of this program.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Feb 2018 09:42:47 -0500 2018-03-07T12:00:00-05:00 2018-03-07T13:00:00-05:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Department Colloquium | Interfacing Spins with Photons for Quantum Simulation and Quantum Control (March 7, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50236 50236-11690313@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 7, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The hallmark of quantum information is its capacity to be non-local, woven into correlations among two, three, or many entangled particles. By contrast, the interactions between particles are necessarily local, restricting the types of quantum states that appear in nature. Nevertheless, non-local interactions feature in a wide range of conceptual models, from spin models encoding hard optimization problems to toy models of quantum gravity and information scrambling in black holes. Motivated by prospects for exploring these concepts in the laboratory, I will present recent progress in engineering and probing effectively non-local interactions in experiments with cold atoms, with photons serving as messengers conveying information between them.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 07 Mar 2018 18:16:19 -0500 2018-03-07T16:00:00-05:00 2018-03-07T17:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Life After Graduate School Seminar | Medical Physics: Using Physics to Save and Extend Lives (March 9, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50458 50458-11771163@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 9, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics


Looking for a practical and rewarding career where you can put your Physics PhD to good use? Medical Physics might be for you. Medical Physicists use both their theoretical knowledge and experimental hands-on skills to work with teams of Radiation Oncology professionals to treat cancer patients and to improve treatment technologies. We’ll discuss the role that Medical Physicists play in the clinic, research and industrial settings of Radiation Oncology, as well as the path to becoming a Medical Physicist.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 09 Mar 2018 18:16:16 -0500 2018-03-09T12:00:00-05:00 2018-03-09T13:00:00-05:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Flavor-Specific Scalar Mediators (March 9, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50657 50657-11847603@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 9, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

New singlet scalar bosons have broad phenomenological utility and feature prominently in many extensions of the Standard Model. Such scalars are often taken to have Higgs-like couplings to SM fermions in order to evade stringent flavor bounds, e.g. by assuming Minimal Flavor Violation (MFV), which leads to a rather characteristic phenomenology. Here we describe an alternative approach, based on an effective field theory framework for a new scalar that dominantly couples to one specific SM fermion mass eigenstate. A simple flavor hypothesis, similar in spirit to MFV, ensures adequate suppression of new flavor changing neutral currents. We consider radiatively generated flavor changing neutral currents and scalar potential terms in such theories, demonstrating that they are often suppressed by small Yukawa couplings, and also describe the role of CP symmetry. We further demonstrate that such scalars can have masses that are significantly below the electroweak scale while still being technically natural, provided they are sufficiently weakly coupled to ordinary matter. In comparison to MFV, our framework is rather versatile since a single (or a few) desired scalar couplings may be investigated in isolation. We illustrate this by discussing in detail the examples of an up-specific scalar mediator to dark matter and a muon-specific scalar that may address the muon anomalous magnetic moment discrepancy.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 05 Mar 2018 08:15:42 -0500 2018-03-09T15:00:00-05:00 2018-03-09T16:00:00-05:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Saturday Morning Physics | Spins, Magnetism and Computers (March 10, 2018 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48128 48128-11180723@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, March 10, 2018 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

How do computers work, and what is a hard drive? There has been tremendous progress in making computers faster and smaller, but what comes next? In this talk, Professor Vanessa Sih will describe the role that spin and magnets play in today's computers and in proposed future technology.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 12 Jan 2018 13:20:50 -0500 2018-03-10T10:30:00-05:00 2018-03-10T11:30:00-05:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Lecture / Discussion Lab
Foundations of Modern Physics interdisciplinary reading group (FOMP) | Particle Physics after the Discovery of the Higgs Boson (March 11, 2018 9:40am) https://events.umich.edu/event/49616 49616-11484722@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Sunday, March 11, 2018 9:40am
Location: Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.)
Organized By: Department of Physics

Registration link: https://goo.gl/forms/kqitVpWhC2WI5JWr1

List of speakers:
Prof. Bing Zhou (UMich, Physics)
Dr. Chris Quigg (Fermilab)
Prof. Porter Williams (University of Pittsburgh, History and Philosophy of Science)
Prof. Tian Cao (Boston University, Philosophy): Ontological foundations of the Higgs mechanism

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 01 Feb 2018 10:40:22 -0500 2018-03-11T09:40:00-04:00 2018-03-11T17:45:00-04:00 Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.) Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar Foundations of Particle Physics Workshop
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (March 12, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656630@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 12, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-03-12T14:00:00-04:00 2018-03-12T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
HEP-Astro Seminar | Galaxy Cluster Cosmology with the Dark Energy Survey (March 12, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50607 50607-11816521@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 12, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Constraining LambdaCDM cosmology with galaxy cluster abundance is one of the fundamental goals of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Many thousands of clusters out to redshift 0.65 have been identified in DES data. Weak lensing and multi-wavelength studies with X-ray and cosmic microwave background observations are performed to provide inputs to the cosmology analysis. A cosmology pipeline that considers various systematic effects such as cluster projections and mis-centering is used to derive constraints on LambdaCDM cosmology parameters. In this talk, I will present current progress on DES galaxy cluster cosmology analyses as well as discuss future improvements.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Mar 2018 18:16:12 -0400 2018-03-12T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-12T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (March 13, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656541@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 13, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-03-13T14:00:00-04:00 2018-03-13T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
CM-AMO Seminar | Bose Fireworks: Coherent Emission of Matter-wave Jets (March 13, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42205 42205-9584893@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 13, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Experiments frequently come with surprises. In a driven Bose-Einstein condensate, we observe unexpectedly generation of many matter-wave jets leaving the condensate with quantized momenta as a result of bosonic stimulation. Based on a pattern recognition scheme, we identify a universal pattern of correlations which offers essential clues to unveiling the underlying microscopic processes.

Finally, connection of the matterwave jets to the dijet structure in heave ion collider will be discussed.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 13 Mar 2018 18:16:41 -0400 2018-03-13T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-13T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Series | Empirical Determination of the Dark Matter Velocity Distribution (March 14, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50189 50189-11656314@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 14, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

Using the hydrodynamic simulation Eris, as well as various realizations of the Milky Way from the FIRE simulation, we found that the kinematics of dark matter follows closely the kinematics of old metal poor stars. We use this correspondence to obtain the first empirical measurement of the local velocity distribution of dark matter, by first analyzing the Gaia data release coupled with RAVE as well as the ninth release from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and computing the velocity distribution of metal poor stars. We find that this velocity distribution is peaked at lower velocities than the generally assumed Maxwell Boltzmann distribution, leading to a weakening of direct detection limits at dark matter masses less than 10 GeV by a factor of a few. We also found a few kinematic outliers in the stellar data that might be hints of dark matter substructure.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 16 Feb 2018 15:05:30 -0500 2018-03-14T12:00:00-04:00 2018-03-14T13:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (March 14, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656585@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 14, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-03-14T14:00:00-04:00 2018-03-14T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
2018 Helmut W. Baer Lecture in Physics | Detecting the Tiny Thump of the Neutrino (March 14, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/40987 40987-8875735@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 14, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department Colloquia

Neutrinos are “ghostly” particles, interacting only rarely with matter. Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) was first predicted in 1973; it’s a process in which a neutrino scatters off an entire nucleus. By neutrino standards, CEvNS occurs frequently, but it is tremendously challenging to see. The only way to observe it is to detect the minuscule thump of the nuclear recoil. CEvNS was measured for the first time by the COHERENT collaboration using the unique, high-quality source of neutrinos from the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This talk will describe COHERENT's recent measurement of CEvNS, the status and plans of COHERENT's suite of detectors at the SNS, and the physics we will learn from the measurements.

The Helmut W. Baer Lecture is a special colloquium supported by family and friends in honor of Dr. Helmut Baer. Dr. Baer's career in physics began with his work at the University of Michigan where he was awarded a doctorate in nuclear physics in 1967. He published over 100 articles that cover a range of physics topics including nuclear physics and pion interactions. Dr. Baer was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in March of 1989, and to his delight enjoyed countless opportunities over the years to talk about physics at universities and conferences internationally. Dr. Baer set the highest personal standards for himself and his research. This lecture is held approximately every two years.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 13 Mar 2018 14:12:31 -0400 2018-03-14T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-14T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department Colloquia Lecture / Discussion West Hall
2017 Ralph B. Baldwin Prize in Astrophysics and Space Science Lecture (March 16, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50974 50974-11930607@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 16, 2018 3:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering

he Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering cordially welcomes all to the 2017 Ralph Baldwin Prize in Astrophysics and Space Science Lecture on Friday, March 16 in the SRB Auditorium, room 2246, Space Research Building. Our guest lecturer will be 2018 Ralph Baldwin Prize recipient and Climate & Space alumna, Dr. Lois Keller Sarno-Smith.

3-4 p.m. - Student Q & A
4-5 p.m. - Ralph Baldwin Prize in Astrophysics and Space Science Lecture
5-6:30 p.m. - Reception in SRB second floor lounge.
Please join us!

The Ralph B. Baldwin Prize in Astrophysics and Space Sciences is an award sponsored by a generous gift to the University of Michigan by Dr. Ralph B. Baldwin. Applicants must show original and significant contributions to their field as measured in their scholarly publications.

The prize is awarded annually to a student who has received a University of Michigan Ph.D. during the previous year. A faculty committee comprised of representatives from the appropriate departments judges the packages submitted on the basis of the excellence of their research activities revealed in the student's thesis and publications during their career.

Lecture Title: "From Low Energy Plasma to Super Bowl Ads and Outlook Email - A Non-Linear Path"

Abstract: It's rare that we follow an intended path, but it doesn't mean the lessons learned and skills developed won't apply to the next step. This talk will cover what I'm legally allowed to talk about the research projects I've completed since my defense in September 2016. These projects range from predicting ad success on prime time shows using machine learning to how I'm currently part of a team that is changing how Microsoft Outlook develops new features in their email. While it's hardly rocket science, life in data science is changing, dynamic, and quite a bit of fun right now.

Biography: Lois Keller Sarno-Smith received her PhD from the University of Michigan CLaSP department in 2016 under Professor Mike Liemohn's guidance. She now works at Microsoft as part of a Data Engineer/Science team in Outlook Universal Email. She's doesn't have kids or any of the other things people usually put here, but she does ride her bike(s) quite a bit, wears hair bows, and sings in the shower.

Reception to follow in SRB second floor lounge.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 12 Mar 2018 16:49:42 -0400 2018-03-16T15:00:00-04:00 2018-03-16T19:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering Lecture / Discussion
HET Seminars | Constraints on Interacting Massive High Spins (March 16, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49951 49951-11608290@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 16, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

There seem to be no good examples of UV complete theories that have low-lying massive higher spin states isolated by a large gap, despite the relative ease of constructing effective field theories describing such states. We discuss constraints from analytic dispersion relations and subluminality of eikonal scattering that may help to explain this and provide insight into the possible interactions of massive higher spins.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 12 Feb 2018 09:38:08 -0500 2018-03-16T15:00:00-04:00 2018-03-16T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Saturday Morning Physics | Using Physics to Fish for Cells (March 17, 2018 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48129 48129-11180724@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, March 17, 2018 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

The separation and detection of cells, DNA, and proteins from blood samples is essential for testing diseases, drug development, and biological research. This talk will discuss how physics is being used to separate cells and will include emerging approaches that range from magnetics to microbubbles. Dr. McNaughton will also include several demos of these technologies.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 12 Jan 2018 13:20:17 -0500 2018-03-17T10:30:00-04:00 2018-03-17T11:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Lecture / Discussion Cells
The Higgs Boson and Beyond (March 19, 2018 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48108 48108-11180654@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 19, 2018 1:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (50+)

In 2012, physicists at the world’s largest particle accelerator at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, announced to great fanfare the discovery of a fundamental particle in physics called the Higgs boson, culminating a decades long search and putting to rest what was called “the central problem in particle physics.” What exactly is the Higgs boson and why was its discovery so important? In this course we will view and discuss a Teaching Company series of lectures of the same title by Cal Tech physics professor and author Sean Carroll, who describes for a lay audience what particle physics is all about and how the Higgs gives mass to everything in the universe,
making life possible. There will be two lectures per session with 20 minutes of discussion following each. Craig Stephan is a physicist who worked for 30+ years at Ford Research and Argonne National Laboratories. He has led several OLLI discussion groups, including ones on cosmology and climate change.
This Study Group is for those over 50, and will meet Mondays March 19-April 23.

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Class / Instruction Sun, 07 Jan 2018 15:38:04 -0500 2018-03-19T13:00:00-04:00 2018-03-19T15:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (50+) Class / Instruction OLLI Study Group
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (March 19, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656631@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 19, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-03-19T14:00:00-04:00 2018-03-19T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
HEP-Astro Seminar | First Measurement of Monoenergetic Muon Neutrino Charged Current Interactions (March 19, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51013 51013-11941995@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 19, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

This talk will present the first measurement of monoenergetic muon neutrino charged current interactions. The MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab has been used to isolate and study 236 MeV muon neutrino events originating from charged kaon decay at rest. The muon kinematics and total cross section have been extracted from this data. Notably, this result is the first known-energy, weak-interaction-only probe of the nucleus to yield a measurement of omega (energy transferred to the nucleus) using neutrinos, a quantity thus far only accessible through electron scattering. I will discuss the significance of this measurement, and these monoenergetic neutrinos in general, for elucidating both the neutrino-nucleus interaction and oscillations.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 19 Mar 2018 18:16:01 -0400 2018-03-19T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-19T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (March 20, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656542@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 20, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-03-20T14:00:00-04:00 2018-03-20T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
CM-AMO Seminar | New Phase Transitions in Atomically Thin Quantum Materials (March 20, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42206 42206-9584894@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 20, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

We have recently demonstrated an experimental platform to isolate 2D quantum materials that are unstable in the ambient environment. I will discuss our studies of the Weyl semimetal candidate, 1T’-MoTe2, and layered magnetic insulator, CrI3, in the atomically thin limit, made possible using this technique. In MoTe2, lowering dimensionality suppresses the inversion symmetric monoclinic phase, driving the Weyl ground state up to and beyond room temperature. The different electronic structure of thin samples is studied by magnetotransport measurements at low temperature. In CrI3, we observe a very large negative magnetoresistance effect comparable to colossal magnetoresistance in the manganites. I will explain the origin of this effect and discuss some new opportunities in spintronics incorporating 2D magnets.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 20 Mar 2018 18:16:03 -0400 2018-03-20T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-20T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Series | Conformal truncation: A new method for studying strong-coupled QFTs (March 21, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51154 51154-12007285@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 21, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

I will present a new numerical method for studying strongly-coupled QFTs. The method is formulated for continuum spacetime of any dimension, in real time and infinite volume, and is thus complementary to other numerical methods, such as the lattice. The method harnesses conformal symmetry, but in a manner applicable to general, non-conformal QFTs. Specifically, the input is information about the UV CFT from which the QFT originates. The output is the physical IR QFT spectrum, along with real-time, infinite-volume correlation functions. I will discuss applications to 2D phi^4 theory, where we have performed novel computations of correlation functions at any coupling, such as the Zamolodchikov c-function along the full RG-flow. The 2D Ising model provides a highly-nontrivial cross-check of our numerics.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 19 Mar 2018 08:22:22 -0400 2018-03-21T12:00:00-04:00 2018-03-21T13:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (March 21, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656586@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 21, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-03-21T14:00:00-04:00 2018-03-21T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
Department Colloquium | An M.S.-to-Ph.D. Physics Bridge Program and Other Diversity and Student Support Enhancing Activities in the OSU Physics Graduate Program (March 21, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50367 50367-11724549@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 21, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Lack of diversity in physics and other STEM PhD programs is a chronic issue. In recent years, less than 7% of domestic physics PhDs awarded nationwide have gone to students from underrepresented minority (URM) groups, even though they make up 35% of the college age population. Increasing diversity in a physics PhD program can be difficult, especially if the program receives a low number of “traditionally qualified” URM applicants. Inspired by successful STEM Bridge programs at San Francisco State, Fisk-Vanderbilt, and Michigan, the Ohio State University MS-to-PhD Physics Bridge Program (OSU-BP) was established in late 2012 with unanimous faculty support to increase the pool of qualified applicants from underrepresented groups, and accepted its first cohort of four Bridge students in August 2013. I will discuss activities and events that preceded and followed the creation of the OSU-BP, which have coincided with an increase in the representation of URM students in the OSU Physics PhD program from less than 5% of domestic students in 2012 to almost 20% in autumn 2017. These include building a core group of committed faculty colleagues, partnering with the American Physical Society Bridge Program for nationwide recruiting and other support, working with colleagues in Physics Education Research (PER) to develop new graduate physics academic support programs, and expanding holistic PhD admissions practices. I will also discuss on-going and future efforts, opportunities, and obstacles for increasing diversity in graduate programs at OSU and elsewhere. I would like to acknowledge the essential contributions of OSU Bridge Program Co-Director Jay Gupta, PER colleagues Andrew Heckler and Chris Porter, and many other colleagues who worked so hard to help these efforts succeed.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 21 Mar 2018 18:16:06 -0400 2018-03-21T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-21T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The 2018 MICDE Annual Symposium (March 22, 2018 8:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48890 48890-11320067@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, March 22, 2018 8:00am
Location: Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.)
Organized By: Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering

The symposium will highlight how computational science is advancing research from the molecular to the atmospheric scale.
We welcome back Cleve Moler, original author of Matlab ®, and co-founder of MathWorks, as a keynote speaker.
He will be joined by: Gurudurth Banavar — co-founder and CTO, Viome; Cyhthia Chestek — Biomedical Engineering & EECS, U-M; Alison Marsden — Pediatrics and Bioengineering, Stanford University; Raju Namburu — Chief Scientist, Army Research Lab; Stephen Smith — Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, U-M; Beth Wingate — Professor of Mathematics, University of Exeter.

As always, the symposium will also feature a poster competition highlighting notable computational work from U-M postdocs and students. The posters have proved highly popular in previous years, and we look forward to this year’s submissions.

Please RSVP at micde.umich.edu/symposium18

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Conference / Symposium Tue, 13 Mar 2018 10:28:06 -0400 2018-03-22T08:00:00-04:00 2018-03-22T17:00:00-04:00 Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.) Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering Conference / Symposium Symposium Image
Effects of invasions on the structure, stability and evolution of complex food webs (March 22, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/49830 49830-11543792@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, March 22, 2018 11:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: The Center for the Study of Complex Systems

Abstract: A critically important challenge in theoretical ecology is to better predict responses of ecological networks to global change, especially responses to increasing rates of species invasions. Invaders have been widely observed to trigger changes in species’ interactions and abundances and even cause catastrophic extinction cascades of native species. Classical food web models have focused on explaining and predicting such ecological responses on relatively short time scales. However, these models typically neglect changes in selection pressure on native species caused by the invaders and their subsequent effects on the structure and stability of food webs on longer time scales. I address these issues using an eco-evolutionary model containing both invasion and mutation events. It integrates classical assembly models, which describe the emergence of a food web via sequential invasions, with so-called evolutionary food web models or large community evolution models, which describe food web emergence via speciation due to small mutation steps. The model uses body masses and diets as the key traits that determine metabolic rates and species interactions. I vary the frequency of invasion events in relation to speciation events and the relatedness between native species and invaders. I then analyze the size of the emerging network (in terms of total biomass and number of morphs or ‘species’), its ecological and evolutionary stability, and its species turnover pattern. The results show that food webs evolve most diverse and accumulate the most biomass when being exposed to frequent invasions of species similar to native species. The system is also most stable in such invasion context, both evolutionary (i.e., lower variability in the number of morphs/species over time) and ecologically (i.e., lower variability in total biomass over time)

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 16 Mar 2018 15:32:10 -0400 2018-03-22T11:30:00-04:00 2018-03-22T13:00:00-04:00 Weiser Hall The Center for the Study of Complex Systems Workshop / Seminar korinna graphic headshot
Saturday Morning Physics | Sound, Shapes and Photosynthesis: Physics is Everywhere (March 24, 2018 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48130 48130-11180725@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, March 24, 2018 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

We also celebrate the Van Loo Saturday Morning Physics Lecture on this date.
(Three talks in one)
Entropy, Shape, and Phase Transition - Chrisy Xiyu Du (U-M Physics)
Using Femtosecond Spectroscopy to Illuminate Photosynthesis - Veronica Policht (U-M Physics)
Photosynthesis powers life on Earth. Following the initial absorption of light, the primary energy conversion steps in photosynthesis occur incredibly rapidly (10^-12 s), making it particularly challenging to study. We'll discuss how carefully timed sequences of ultrafast laser pulses enable us to take real-time snapshots that improve our understanding of this critical process.
The Sound Heard 'Round the World' - Brian Worthmann (U-M Applied Physics)
In everyday life, we as humans are used to sounds traveling anywhere from a few feet for a quiet conversation, up to a few miles for some of the loudest sounds. But in the ocean, a fascinating combination of physics allows sound to travel significantly much, much further. We'll talk about how sound travels in air, why it's different in the ocean, and why this fact was a closely guarded secret during the Cold War.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 16 Mar 2018 10:12:44 -0400 2018-03-24T10:30:00-04:00 2018-03-24T11:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Lecture / Discussion Plants
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (March 26, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656632@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 26, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-03-26T14:00:00-04:00 2018-03-26T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
HEP-Astro Seminar | Characterizing Hot and Dense Nuclear Matter Using Temperature Fluctuation (March 26, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51119 51119-11976184@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 26, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Power law formulae have routinely been used to describe the transverse momentum spectra of the hadrons at high energies. The Tsallis distribution is one among them which has been very successful in explaining the experimental transverse momentum distribution, longitudinal momentum fraction distribution as well as the rapidity distribution of the hadrons in electron-positron and proton-proton collisions. The Tsallis distribution is a two parameter power-law distribution, described by the Tsallis parameter q (which can be related to the relative variance in temperature) and the Tsallis temperature T, which reduces to the Boltzmann (exponential) distribution when q goes to 1. The Tsallis distribution has been used in many fields of the physical as well as the social sciences (like Statistical Mechanics, Geology, Anatomy, Economics, Finance and many more). In the realm of the physical sciences it arises when there are systems with non-ideal effects like long range correlation, memory effect etc. Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), the hot and dense medium created during the high energy collision phenomena, is one such example. This medium has been under intensive study for the past few decades and we will discuss how the Tsallis distribution can be used for characterization of QGP.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 26 Mar 2018 18:15:55 -0400 2018-03-26T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-26T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (March 27, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656543@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 27, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-03-27T14:00:00-04:00 2018-03-27T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
CM-AMO Seminar | Controlled Transfer of Electronic Wavepacket Motion Between Distant Atoms (March 27, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42207 42207-9584895@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 27, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The establishment, observation, and potential control of correlated multi-electron dynamics is a complex problem of interest across disciplines with numerous applications in a variety of contexts, from femtosecond interatomic Coulomb decay and attosecond charge migration within small molecules, to energy transfer in photosynthetic systems, to quantum control of few- and many-body systems, and quantum information processing. The extreme sensitivity of Rydberg atoms to electric fields, including those produced by neighboring atoms, makes them superb candidates for studying such phenomena. In a quantum analogy to classical far-field radio transmission from a source to receiver antenna, we have transferred electronic wavepacket motion established within Rydberg atoms in a dilute nearly-frozen gas to neighboring Rydberg atoms. The transfer is enabled by electron correlations resulting from electric field-controlled, atom-atom couplings and relies on the use of both cold atom and ultrafast techniques.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 27 Mar 2018 18:15:53 -0400 2018-03-27T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-27T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Series | A Natural Generalization of the Standard Randall-Sundrum Framework and its Phenomenological Implications (March 28, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51355 51355-12086777@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 28, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

In the first part of the talk, I will introduce a very natural extension of well-motivated extra-dimensional framework of Randall-Sundrum type. Such a generalization is motivated by (null) results from both high energy (LHC) and low energy (flavor, CP, and electroweak precision) experiments. In particular, null results from the LHC led us to consider the possibility that little hierarchy may exist. In addition to the consistency with low energy bounds, our generalization can address the question of the form of TeV scale new physics we can expect. I will argue that such new physics appearing at the TeV scale is in the form of vector-like confinement with new states interacting with SM through mostly flavor universal couplings. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss several exciting signals probable at the LHC and in future colliders.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 26 Mar 2018 08:22:19 -0400 2018-03-28T12:00:00-04:00 2018-03-28T13:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (March 28, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656587@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 28, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-03-28T14:00:00-04:00 2018-03-28T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
2018 Ford Distinguished Lecture in Physics | From Bits to Qubits: A Quantum Leap for Computers (March 28, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/40839 40839-8799223@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 28, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Ross School of Business
Organized By: Department Colloquia

The steady increase in computational power of information processors over the past half-century has led to smart phones and the internet, changing commerce and our social lives. Up to now, the primary way that computational power has increased is that the electronic components have been made smaller and smaller, but within the next decade it is expected to reach the fundamental limits imposed by the size of atoms. However, it is possible that further huge increases in computational power could be achieved by building quantum computers, which exploit in new ways of the laws of quantum mechanics that govern the physical world. This talk will discuss the challenges involved in building a large-scale quantum computer as well as progress that we have made in developing a quantum computer using silicon quantum dots.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 27 Mar 2018 13:20:15 -0400 2018-03-28T16:00:00-04:00 2018-03-28T17:00:00-04:00 Ross School of Business Department Colloquia Lecture / Discussion Photo of Susan Coppersmith
Third Annual RNA Symposium "Advancing Basic RNA Biosciences into Therapeutics” (March 30, 2018 8:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/49703 49703-11498722@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 30, 2018 8:30am
Location: Taubman Biomedical Science Research Building
Organized By: Center for RNA Biomedicine

MORNING WELCOME & INTRODUCTION:
Martin Philbert, PhD
Dean, School of Public Health, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, Professor of Toxicology

• Jonathan Weissman, PhD
HHMI Investigator
Professor • Cellular and Molecular Medicine • University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine

• Eric Fearon, MD, PhD
Emanuel N. Maisel Professor of Oncology
Director • University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center
Professor • Departments of Internal Medicine, Human Genetics, and Pathology • University of Michigan

• Melissa Moore, PhD
Eleanor Eustis Farrington Chair in Cancer Research
Professor • RNA Therapeutics Institute and Biochemistry & Molecular Pharmacology • University of Massachusetts Medical School
Chief Scientific Officer • Moderna mRNA Research Platform

AFTERNOON WELCOME &INTRODUCTION :
Bishr Omary, MD, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer of Michigan Medicine, Professor, Molecular & Integrative Physiology, H Marvin Pollard Professor of Gastroenterology Professor, Internal Medicine

• Roy Parker, PhD
Cech-Leinwand Endowed Chair of Biochemistry
Professor • University of Colorado Boulder

• Anastasia Khvorova, PhD
Professor • RNA Therapeutics Institute and Program in Molecular Medicine • University of Massachusetts Medical School

PANEL DISCUSSION moderated by:
Bradley Martin, PhD, Fast Forward Medical Innovation

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Conference / Symposium Mon, 26 Mar 2018 15:50:31 -0400 2018-03-30T08:30:00-04:00 2018-03-30T16:00:00-04:00 Taubman Biomedical Science Research Building Center for RNA Biomedicine Conference / Symposium Flyer
Life After Graduate School Seminar | From Research to Research Publishing (March 30, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51101 51101-11964840@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 30, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

I shall briefly describe my education and the first part of my career, as a research scientist in computational high energy physics. Mid career, I switched to research publishing, working as an editor for Physical Review D. For the reminder of the talk I will give you an impression of the duties of an editor for one of the Physical Review journals. Our main activity is guiding the peer review process of submitted papers.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 30 Mar 2018 18:15:58 -0400 2018-03-30T12:00:00-04:00 2018-03-30T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Gravitational Probes of Dark Matter Physics (March 30, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51356 51356-12086778@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 30, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

Dark matter orchestrates the expansion of the universe and the development of the cosmic web of structure, yet its identity is unknown. We know that dark matter molds luminous matter into galaxies, yet the microphysical processes that govern its own creation and evolution remain a mystery. Despite its cosmic importance, the nature of dark matter remains one of the biggest unsolved problems in fundamental physics. However, it is one that may be solved with the tools of astronomy. In this talk, I will show how astronomical observations have shaped our understanding of the microphysical properties of dark matter. I will discuss the exciting prospects for a new generation of astronomical facilities to enable measurements of dark matter physics.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 26 Mar 2018 08:24:17 -0400 2018-03-30T15:00:00-04:00 2018-03-30T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (April 2, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656633@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 2, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-04-02T14:00:00-04:00 2018-04-02T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
KOTO: The Search for the Elusive KL → πνν (April 2, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51418 51418-12101062@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 2, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HEP - Astro Seminars

The KOTO experiment was designed to observe and study the KL → πνν decay. The Standard Model (SM) prediction for the mode is 2.4 x 10-11 with a small theoretical uncertainty. An experimental upper limit of 2.6 x 10-8 was set by the KEK E391a collaboration. The rare “golden” decay is ideal for probing for physics beyond the standard model. A comparison of experimentally obtained results with SM calculations permits a test of the quark flavor region and provides a means to search for new physics.

The signature of the decay is a pair of photons from the π0 decay and no other detected particles. For the measurement of the energies and positions of the photons, KOTO uses a Cesium Iodide (CSI) electromagnetic calorimeter as the main detector, and hermetic veto counters to guarantee that there are no other detected particles. KOTO’s initial data was collected in 2013 and achieved a similar sensitivity as E391a result. Since then, we completed significant hardware upgrades and had additional physics runs in 2015 at beam powers of roughly 24--40 kW. This presentation will recap the efforts of KOTO and its sustained pursuit of detecting KL → πνν.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 28 Mar 2018 14:30:04 -0400 2018-04-02T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-02T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall HEP - Astro Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
The Silver Lining- Addressing Challenges faced by Women in STEM (April 2, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51191 51191-12015774@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 2, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Pierpont Commons
Organized By: Michigan Earth Science Women's Network

Michigan Earth Science Women's Network (M-ESWN) brings to you its much awaited capstone event of Winter 2018- 'The Silver Lining - Addressing Challenges faced by Women in STEM'. The event will feature talks from three speakers followed by a Networking Dinner.

For more information and RSVP - https://meswnsilverlining.eventbrite.com

Talks and Discussion : 4:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Networking Dinner by MDining : 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

1. Addressing sexual harassment in STEM by Dr. Blair Schneider - She is a Postdoctoral Fellow, TRESTLE Program Manager at University of Kansas Center for Teaching Excellence. She is a Co-PI on NSF-AGU grant to address gender issues in geosciences. She has also led the convening of the special task force to rewrite the AGU code of ethics.

2. How to foster a healthy Work-Life Balance by Barbara Mulay - Barb Mulay, Manager of the Work-Life Resource Center, provides information to University of Michigan Faculty, Staff, and Students in the area of Work-Life integration. She administers and markets the back-up child care program, Kids Kare at Home, and oversees the Family Helpers on-line job posting site that connects University of Michigan Students and retirees with Faculty and Staff needing short term family care and/or assistance. Barb also provides information on locating resources for aging or dependent relatives, flexible scheduling options, and coordinates the annual "Connecting the Dots" conference on work-life topics.

3. Mastering Goal Achievement: Three Power Steps by Glenda Haskell - She is a Career and a Retirement Coach. She leads the 'Full Spectrum Career Success LLC' and has changed many lives. She is also certified as an Associate Certified Coach by the International Coach Federation (ICF). At the University of Michigan, Glenda has been an Assistant Vice Provost for Academic and Faculty Affairs, Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs (2002-2011). She was also an Assistant to the Dean, Rackham Graduate School (1996-2002).

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 20 Mar 2018 01:41:33 -0400 2018-04-02T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-02T20:00:00-04:00 Pierpont Commons Michigan Earth Science Women's Network Lecture / Discussion Job statistics and Women in Stem image
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (April 3, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656544@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-04-03T14:00:00-04:00 2018-04-03T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
CM-AMO Seminar | 2D Materials: Superconductivity and Magnetism (April 3, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42208 42208-9584896@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, April 3, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The discovery of graphene has stimulated not only the field of carbon nanoelectronics, but also studies of novel electronic phenomena in a wide range of 2D van der Waals’ materials. In this talk, I will discuss our recent studies on two seemingly unrelated 2D materials: non-centrosymmetric superconducting NbSe_2 and magnetic CrI_3. As a result of the crystal symmetry and spin-orbit interactions, the electron spins in both of these materials become Ising-like (i.e. spins locked to the out-of-plane direction), giving rise to unique magnetic properties. First I will discuss how the Ising spins in 2D NbSe_2 protect superconductivity under very high magnetic fields and experimental signatures of spin-triplet pairing correlations through tunneling measurements. I will then discuss our recent efforts in studying 2D magnetism in CrI_3 by electric fields. If time allows, I will briefly discuss interesting future directions by combining these two materials to form heterostructures.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 03 Apr 2018 18:15:49 -0400 2018-04-03T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-03T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Brown Bag Series | Supertranslations and Superrotations at the Black Hole Horizon (April 4, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51560 51560-12167536@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, April 4, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

In this talk, we study the asymptotic symmetries in the near-horizon region of extremal and non-extremal black holes. By prescribing a physically sensible set of boundary conditions at the horizon, we derive the algebra of asymptotic Killing vectors, which is shown to be infinite-dimensional; it includes two sets of supertranslations and two mutually commuting copies of the Virasoro algebra. We define the surface charges associated to these large diffeomorphisms and evaluate them for different stationary black hole solutions. We finally discuss the relationship between these horizon charges and the Bondi-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) ones by computing the memory effect produced at the black hole horizon by a gravitational shock wave sent from null infinity.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Apr 2018 08:20:37 -0400 2018-04-04T12:00:00-04:00 2018-04-04T13:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (April 4, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656588@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, April 4, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-04-04T14:00:00-04:00 2018-04-04T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
Department Colloquium | Meeting Dirac’s Challenge: Progress Towards a Theory of Correlated Electrons in Materials and Molecules (April 4, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51267 51267-12032763@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, April 4, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

This talk will present an overview of recent progress towards the solution of one of the grand-challenges of modern science: computing the properties of interacting electrons in molecules and solids. I will argue that the theoretical methodology has reached the point where we can say with confidence that the two dimensional Hubbard model captures key aspects of the high transition temperature superconductivity observed in layered copper-oxide compounds and can delineate which phenomena are not accounted for by this model. I will further summarize the current status of our extension of the methods to fully physically realistic systems, emphasizing the areas of theoretical uncertainty and the prospects for resolution.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 04 Apr 2018 18:15:52 -0400 2018-04-04T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-04T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Black Holes & Number Theory: How to Bootstrap a Black Hole via Modular Forms (April 5, 2018 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/51561 51561-12167537@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, April 5, 2018 11:30am
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

In the language of statistical physics, an extremal black hole is a zero temperature system with a huge amount of residual entropy. Understanding which class of counting formulas can account for a large degeneracy will undoubtedly unveil interesting properties of quantum gravity. In this talk I will discuss the application of Siegel modular forms to black hole entropy counting. The role of the Igusa cusp form in the D1D5P system is well-known in string theory, and its transformation properties are what allow precision microstate counting in this case. We implement this counting for other Siegel modular and paramodular forms, and we show that they could serve as candidates for other gravitational systems.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Apr 2018 08:24:42 -0400 2018-04-05T11:30:00-04:00 2018-04-05T12:30:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
CGIS Open Advising (April 5, 2018 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/47710 47710-11002084@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, April 5, 2018 1:00pm
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Center for Global and Intercultural Study

Join us for an open advising event that will be held at CGIS, where advisors will be accepting walk-ins. Come in and speak to advisors about CGIS programs with a September 15th deadline, the application process, scholarship and financial aid, and more! Popcorn & punch will be provided and make sure to check in at the front desk when you arrive.

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Rally / Mass Meeting Fri, 16 Mar 2018 19:39:40 -0400 2018-04-05T13:00:00-04:00 2018-04-05T16:00:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Center for Global and Intercultural Study Rally / Mass Meeting Cristina
Life After Graduate School Seminar | A Career in Science Philanthropy (April 6, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51528 51528-12135383@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 6, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

I will discuss qualifications for and the role of program directors at private nonprofit foundations that fund science research and STEM education initiatives. I’ll focus on how to design effective funding programs to support advances in the physical sciences, how to evaluate grant proposals and ipso facto how to write an effective proposal.

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Workshop / Seminar Fri, 06 Apr 2018 18:16:06 -0400 2018-04-06T12:00:00-04:00 2018-04-06T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
HET Seminars | Revisiting Goldstone's Theorem (April 6, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51563 51563-12167539@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 6, 2018 3:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: HET Seminars

In recent times we have learned that if in QFT, the constraint of locality and/or Lorentz invariance are lifted, the patterns of symmetry breaking are far richer than in local relativistic field theories. Recently we have studied some (conformal) field theories with global symmetries in the sector where the value of the global charge Q is large. We find that the low energy excitations in this sector are described by a particular form of the non-relativistic Goldstone theorem. We also provide heuristic arguments that the effective theory describing such sector contains an effective coupling constant suppressed by powers of the large charge. The comparison of our heuristic arguments with "exact" results (lattice MonteCarlo) are remarkably good.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 02 Apr 2018 08:26:37 -0400 2018-04-06T15:00:00-04:00 2018-04-06T16:00:00-04:00 West Hall HET Seminars Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Saturday Morning Physics | Saturday Morning Physics Lite: Now with 40% Less Facts (April 7, 2018 10:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/48131 48131-11180742@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Saturday, April 7, 2018 10:30am
Location: Weiser Hall
Organized By: Saturday Morning Physics

Do you ever wonder if what you observe in the world around you is real or just a trick of the mind? Let the professionals guide you through a maze of physical demonstrations that will test your confidence in your understanding as we try to trick your mind to see if you can spot the not!

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 12 Jan 2018 13:18:17 -0500 2018-04-07T10:30:00-04:00 2018-04-07T11:30:00-04:00 Weiser Hall Saturday Morning Physics Lecture / Discussion Physics
Quantitative Biology Seminar | Multiple Gamma Mechanisms Co-exist in an Excitatory/Inhibitory Network (April 9, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/49772 49772-11532461@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 9, 2018 12:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Gamma oscillations have been implicated in many cognitive functions. Fast spiking interneurons are thought to play an important role in gamma synchrony. Recently, fast spiking interneurons in the entorhinal cortex have been shown to exhibit type 2 excitability and postinhibitory rebound (PIR). Theoretical work has shown that these properties make interneuronal network gamma (ING) more robust than in networks of type 1 interneurons. Here we show that this robust ING persists in a sparsely connected excitatory network. We also show that phase response curve (PRC) theory can predict under what circumstances the interneurons will sparsely synchronize in two clusters, and how increasing the delay and/or the conductance destabilizes two clusters in favor of a single cluster.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 09 Apr 2018 18:15:38 -0400 2018-04-09T12:00:00-04:00 2018-04-09T13:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (April 9, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656634@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 9, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-04-09T14:00:00-04:00 2018-04-09T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
HEP-Astro Seminar | Addressing Challenges for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) (April 9, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51645 51645-12182149@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 9, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is under construction to measure the expansion history of the universe using the baryon acoustic oscillations technique. The spectra of 35 million galaxies and quasars over 14,000 square degrees will be measured during a 5-year survey. A new prime focus corrector for the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory will deliver light to 5,000 individually targeted fiber-fed robotic positioners. The fibers in turn feed ten broadband multi-object spectrographs. This talk will give an overview of the DESI project and then describe several unique instrument and survey challenges. I will highlight the ProtoDESI experiment, an on-sky technology demonstration with the goal to reduce technical risks associated with aligning optical fibers with targets using robotic fiber positioners and maintaining the stability required to operate DESI. The ProtoDESI prime focus instrument, which was installed and commissioned on the 4-m Mayall telescope from Aug. 14 to Sep. 30, 2016, consisted of three fiber positioners, illuminated fiducials, and a guide camera. ProtoDESI was successful in acquiring targets with the robotically positioned fibers and demonstrated that the DESI guiding requirements can be met. Additionally, I will report progress on a predictive sky background model for DESI, built on the spectra from the 4-year Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This dataset consists of ~1 million unique sky spectra covering 360 - 1040 nm collected in a variety of observational conditions. This detailed model will be integrated into a dynamic exposure time calculator for DESI, which will ensure data quality uniformity and increase survey efficiency.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 09 Apr 2018 18:15:38 -0400 2018-04-09T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-09T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Introductory Techniques Seminars presented by The Michigan Center for Materials Characterization (April 10, 2018 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50185 50185-11656545@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, April 10, 2018 2:00pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 18
Organized By: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization

This continuing series of seminars is designed to introduce potential users of our center to a range of the techniques that are employed with our instruments. For more detail on the instrumentation in the center and the topics covered by our seminars, visit http://mc2.engin.umich.edu. Questions may on the seminar series may be directed to John Mansfield (jfmjfm@umich.edu)

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 30 May 2018 08:08:33 -0400 2018-04-10T14:00:00-04:00 2018-04-10T16:00:00-04:00 North Campus Research Complex Building 18 Michigan Center for Materials Characterization Workshop / Seminar Instruments & Techniques in (MC)2
CM-AMO Seminar | Recent Developments with Few-body Efimov and Rydberg Physics (April 10, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45674 45674-10254211@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, April 10, 2018 4:00pm
Location: West Hall
Organized By: Department of Physics

Experiment and theory have been making rapid strides in these areas recently. In this seminar I will present some of our recent theoretical progress, both for heavy-heavy-light Efimov physics and for ultra-long-range Rydberg molecules. Some suggestions for promising experimental directions will be described.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 10 Apr 2018 18:15:39 -0400 2018-04-10T16:00:00-04:00 2018-04-10T17:00:00-04:00 West Hall Department of Physics Workshop / Seminar West Hall
Harry Potter's Cloak via Transformation Optics (April 10, 2018 4:10pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50378 50378-11724596@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, April 10, 2018 4:10pm
Location: East Hall
Organized By: Department of Mathematics

Can we make objects invisible? This has been a subject of human fascination for millennia in Greek mythology, movies, science fiction, etc. including the legend of Perseus versus Medusa and the more recent Star Trek and Harry Potter. In the last decade or so there have been several scientific proposals to achieve invisibility. We will introduce some of these in a non-technical fashion concentrating on the so-called "transformation optics" that has received the most attention in the scientific literature.

Reception for the Speaker to Follow in the Upper Atrium of East Hall on Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Sponsored by the Ziwet Lecture Series

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 22 Feb 2018 13:23:15 -0500 2018-04-10T16:10:00-04:00 2018-04-10T17:00:00-04:00 East Hall Department of Mathematics Workshop / Seminar East Hall
HET Brown Bag Seminars | GeV-Mass Thermal WIMPs: Not Even Slightly Dead (April 11, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/51779 51779-12248758@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, April 11, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Randall Laboratory
Organized By: HET Brown Bag Series

A leading dark matter candidate is a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). The observed dark matter abundance can be naturally obtained through freezeout of the thermal annihilation rate. The defining feature of a thermal WIMP is that its total annihilation cross section is specified through the rate ~ 3 x 10^-26 cm^3/s, inversely proportional to the dark matter density. Searches for dark matter annihilation products have set strong limits in certain cases, requiring that the dark matter mass be greater than around 100 GeV if annihilation proceed solely to b quarks (Fermi), τ leptons (Fermi), or electrons (AMS). We construct the first limits on the total annihilation cross section, showing that allowed combinations of the annihilation-channel branching ratios considerably weaken these limits. We will show that GeV-mass thermal WIMPs have not yet been adequately tested, and outline ways forward.

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Workshop / Seminar Mon, 09 Apr 2018 08:28:47 -0400 2018-04-11T12:00:00-04:00 2018-04-11T13:00:00-04:00 Randall Laboratory HET Brown Bag Series Workshop / Seminar Randall Laboratory