Past Events

Physics Colloquium: “Designing and probing exciton quantum phase transitions in 2D semiconductors” by Yusong Bai - Brown University

Designing and harnessing quantum phases of matter is a central goal in modern physical sciences and information technologies. Quantum phases of matter are predominantly characterized as interacting many-body electronic systems. They often feature intricate interplay between…

Physics Colloquium - "Moiré Materials" Presented by A.H. MacDonald - UT Texas, Austin

The advent of two-dimensional materials in recent years has opened a new opportunity to design quantum metamaterials in which many-particle matter waves waves exhibit strongly-correlated and topologically non-trivial properties that are rare in naturally occuring crystals. For…

Physics Colloquium - "Intimations of universality in nonequilibrium strongly correlated quantum systems" Presented by Professor Aditi Mitra - New York University

It has been hard enough determining the ground states of strongly interacting quantum systems, is the study of their nonequilibrium properties totally hopeless? In this talk I will give an overview of recent results obtained in my group and elsewhere where it has been shown that…

Physics Colloquium - "Electrifying active matter" Presented by Professor Petia Vlahovska - Northwestern University

Bird flocks and fish schools move around like fluid when viewed on a scale much larger than the individuals. Similar large-scale coherent motions have been observed with self-propelled micro-particles such as bacteria and motile colloids. In this talk, I will discuss the…

Physics Colloquium - "Exotic Phases in Moire Systems" Presented by Professor Bogdan Andrei Bernevig, Princeton University

I will review the experimental discoveries and amazing puzzles in Twisted Bilayer Graphene and in twisted MoTe2 which culminated with the discovery of long-thought phases of matter such as the Fractional Chern Insulator. We will then show that, theoretically, most of the…

Physics Colloquium - "The Entropy of Hawking Radiation" Presented by Dr. Maldacena - IAS, Princeton

We will discuss recent progress on the computation of black hole entropy and the entropy of Hawking radiation. This involves an area formula that computes the fine grained or von Neumann entropy of black hole. The result is consistent with unitarity.

Physics Colloquium - "Inquiring Through Black Holes" Presented by Dr. Luis Lehner, Perimeter Institute

Black holes have become unique tools in the understanding of a plethora of phenomena in vastly different fronts. From understanding spectacularly energetic events in our universe, gaining insights on potential new particles to unraveling seemingly unrelated phenomena through a…

Physics Colloquium - "Collective Functionalities Emerging in Microbial Active Matter" Presented by Dr. Mathijssen, University of Pennsylvania

 Microbes often cooperate to withstand predators and compete even with multicellular organisms. Together, they can achieve functionalities that alone they cannot. However, this puzzle of how biological self-organization emerges from the collective dynamics of individual…

Physics Colloquium - "Solving the Mott Problem" Presented by Professor Philip Phillips, UIUC

Superconductivity in the copper-oxide ceramics remains a grand challenge in theoretical physics because of the paucity of tools to treat strongly coupled systems.  In such systems, all intuition based on single-particle physics fails.  Precisely what the propagating…

Physics Colloquium - "The Persistence of Spin Coherence in a Crystalline Environment" By Professor Ivan Biaggio

The colloquium will focus on the entanglement of triplet exciton pairs as it can be observed in some organic molecular crystals. In such crystals, triplet excitons (quasiparticles with a spin of one) can be created as a spin-entangled pair via fission of a photoinduced singlet…

Colloquium Series: Will Horowitz – University of Cape Town

Colloquium Series: Timothy Atherton – Tufts University