UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium James De Yoreo, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory "They Call it Free Energy, so, Hey, Why Pay?" Nucleation is the seminal process in the formation of ordered structures ranging from simple inorganic crystals to macromolecular films. … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Reyco Henning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Dark Matter, Quantum Computers, and all that." The international effort to directly detect and determine the nature of cosmic dark matter is experiencing a transition. Weakly … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Kevork Abazajian, University of California, Irvine "Cosmological Neutrinos" Cosmology has entered a precision era, allowing to make inferences of the constituency of the Universe to the sub-percent level on quantities like the density of matter. … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Walter Pettus, University of Washington "Weighing a Ghost: The Quest to Measure the Neutrino Mass" The ghostly neutrinos remain the only fundamental fermions whose masses are unknown. Neutrino oscillation measurements definitively demonstrate neutrinos have mass, … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Graham Giovanetti, Princeton University "Searching for dark matter with liquid argon" The DarkSide collaboration has undertaken a staged program using argon time projection chambers (TPCs) to search for dark matter. I will introduce DarkSide-50, a … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Danielle Speller, Yale University "Low Temperature Searches for Physics Beyond the Standard Model" The standard model of particle physics provides a useful framework for understanding the known particles and their interactions, and heavily informs our … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Matteo Agostini, Technical University Munich "Neutrinos: a Unique Probe to Uncover the Secrets of Nature" Neutrinos play a key role in our life. They are deeply involved in many particle and nuclear physics processes, from … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Jonathan Ouellet, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "Searches for New Physics at the Edge of Absolute Zero" Why is there something in the universe instead of nothing? What is the nature of the so-called Dark Matter … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Julieta Gruszko, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "Shedding ‘Nu’ Light on the Nature of Matter: The Search for Majorana Neutrinos" Why is the universe dominated by matter, and not antimatter? Neutrinos, with their changing flavors and … Read more