Upcoming Events For Colloquia

Presented by: Prof. Christopher Kolda

During the past few years, physicists have finally completed their century-long program of building a fundamental and unified picture of all known particles found in nature, only to find that key pieces are still missing. In this talk, we will show how our world works at its most fundamental levels, where the gaping holes in our knowledge remain, and how we plan to fill many of these holes in this new century.…

Pigmy resonances, neutron skins and neutron stars

Prof. Carlos Bertulani
Department of Physics & Astronomy
Texas A&M

Hosted by Prof. Mathews…

Detecting the tiny thump of the neutrino

Prof. Kate Scholberg
Department of Physics
Duke University

Neutrinos interact only rarely with matter. Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) was first predicted in 1974; 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.

Title TBA

Prof. Larry Sulak
David M. Myers Distinguished Professor
​​​​​​​Physics
Boston University

Hosted by Prof. LoSecco…

Search for the limits of the elements and their isotopes

Prof. Brad Sherrill
NSCL Director and University Distinguished Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Michigan State University

How many elements exist in nature? Surprisingly, we do not know the answer. The number of known elements is currently at 118 and the number of known isotopes of these elements is around 3100.  The search is on experimentally and theoretically to find out how many more are possible.  Considerable progress has been made recently on all aspects of this problem, from expanding the region of known isotopes, to new approaches to calculate nuclear forces and nearing completion of new accelerator facilities like the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, FRIB. The next generation of nuclear research facilities, like FRIB, will vastly expand the range of nuclides that can be made and will provide key insight for nuclear theory to reliably extrapolate the limits. This talk will explore our understanding of how many elements might exist in nature and the limits of their isotopes. Included will be an outlook for how far we expect to get in the next decade.

Title TBA

Prof. Marino Quiros, IFAE Institute for High Energy Physics
Visiting Professor, University of Notre Dame…

Cyclotron radiation detection to search for new physics

Prof. Alejandro Garcia
Department of Physics
University of Washington

Chirality plays a fundamental role in the Standard Model, where the charged weak current is modeled as purely left handed. Models for new physics naturally break this symmetry, so sensitive searches for chirality-flipping interactions could be a powerful tool for discovery.

We will discuss a proposal for a sensitive search for chirality-flipping interactions by measuring the beta spectrum of ⁶He and other nuclei. We plan to measure the energies via cyclotron radiation emission spectroscopy (CRES) recently demonstrated by the Project 8 collaboration, extending its use to the broader range of electron energies of the ⁶He and other nuclear beta decays.

We will also discuss other possible applications, including experiments that could be carried out at radioactive beam facilities.

Title TBA

Brian O'Shea
Graduate Director, Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering;
Associate Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy
Michigan State University…

Title TBA

Prof. Francis Halzen​​​​​​​
Gregory Breit Professor and Hilldale Professor
​​​​​​​Department of Physics
University of Wisconsin…

Title TBA

Prof. Ned Wingreen
Howard A. Prior Professor in the Life Sciences
Professor of Molecular Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics
Associate Director, Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics
Princeton University

Hosted by Prof. Janko…