Colloquium

Chang Kee Jung

Physics and Astronomy Department Chair
Stony Brook University

Chair's Colloquium

Heather Lewandowski

U Colorado, Boulder

Probing the Frontiers of Interstellar Chemistry Through Cold and Controlled Ion-Molecule Experiments

Ion-molecule reactions drive much of the chemistry of the interstellar medium, yet few have been measured under conditions that truly reflect the cold, dilute environment of space. We apply techniques from the field of cold atomic physics to examine ion-molecule reactions under well-controlled conditions that replicate the environment of space.

Focusing on carbon chemistry relevant to the origins of complex organic molecules, I will discuss recent experiments that probe proposed pathways toward polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) thought to play a central role in interstellar chemistry. These measurements reveal that some long-standing assumptions about how molecular complexity builds up in space may not hold under realistic conditions. Together, these results highlight the importance of controlled laboratory experiments for understanding chemical evolution in the coldest regions of the universe.

Ian Moult

Yale

Energy Correlators at the Collider Frontier

Collider experiments offer a unique opportunity to study the Standard Model, and to search for new physics, new interactions, and new principles of nature.  After a particle collision, the underlying microscopic physics gets imprinted into detailed correlations in macroscopic energy flux, much in analogy to how our cosmic history is imprinted into correlations in the Cosmic Microwave Background.  In quantum field theory (QFT), energy flux in colliders is described by energy flow operators, first introduced 50 years ago in early studies of quantum chromodynamics. These observables, which arise as direct theoretical models of collider experiments, have also played a crucial role in contemporary developments in formal QFT and gravity. Recently it has become possible to measure these observables in new energy regimes, and with unprecedented precision, both at the Large Hadron Collider, and with resurrected data from the Large Electron-Positron Collider experiments, establishing an exciting connection between real world phenomenology,  and advances in formal QFT. In this talk I will present some recent highlights from this program, ranging from record precision extractions of Standard Model parameters, to new measurements of properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma, and searches for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Sheldon Glashow

Boston University

CN Yang Colloquium: My Memories of Frank Yang

The colloquium will be given by Dr. Sheldon Glashow who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction.

We commemorate Prof. CN "Frank" Yang who passed away last year and Yang–Mills theory provided the gauge-theory framework for the Standard Model, whose development began with Dr. Glashow’s groundbreaking 1961 paper on electroweak unification.

Zhoudunming (Kong) Tu

Brookhaven National Laboratory

TBA

TBA

TBA

David Weld

University of California Santa Barbara

TBA

N/A

Fall Break (No Colloquium)

Wren Suess

University of Colorado, Boulder

TBA

TBA

TBA

N/A

Election Day (No Colloquium)

Chiara Salemi

UC Berkeley and LBNL

 TBA

Phiala Shanahan (MIT)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

TBA

N/A

Thanksgiving week (No Colloquium)

Dillon Brout

Boston University

TBA