UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Christoph Baranec, University of Hawaii "Advances in Adaptive Optics Technology at the University of Hawai`i" Since the 1990s, adaptive optics systems have opened up high acuity imaging of astronomical objects from the ground. In response … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Giuliano Scarcelli, University of Maryland “Biophysical contrast mechanisms for biomedical imaging” The interaction between photons and acoustic phonons within materials, first described by Leon Brillouin, has been widely investigated to characterize mechanical and physical properties … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Kim-Vy Tran, Texas A&M University, University of New South Wales “ZFOURGE & MOSEL : Emergent Galaxies at z~3.5” ZFOURGE and MOSEL are deep observational surveys that track how galaxies assemble over cosmic time. ZFOURGE identifies … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium John Wilkerson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Weighing in on Neutrinos — First Results from the KATRIN Experiment” Over the past generation, a series of challenging experiments have revealed that neutrinos have unexpected … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Ana Maria Rey, JILA, NIST, & University of Colorado Boulder “Building with Crystals of Light and Quantum Matter: From clocks to computers” Understanding the behavior of interacting electrons in solids or liquids is at the … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Virginia Kilborn, Swinburne University “Tracing the gaseous surrounds of galaxies” Observations of the neutral atomic hydrogen (HI) component of galaxies is a powerful mechanism to probe the physical properties of galaxies in the nearby Universe. … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium David Albert, Columbia University “How to teach Quantum Mechanics - Part II” I distinguish between two conceptually different kinds of physical space: a space of ordinary material bodies, which is the space of points at … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Aaron Titus, High Point University “Iterative Thinking” Numerical techniques for integration are hardly taught in a typical calculus course and are hardly used in a typical physics course. Yet, numerical integration is an essential tool … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Carl Bender, Washington University in St Louis “PT Symmetry” By using complex-variable methods one can extend conventional Hermitian quantum theories into the complex domain. The result is a huge and exciting new class of parity-time-symmetric … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Piers Coleman, Rutgers University “Dark Matter Challenges of the Solid State” At the turn of the 20th century, physicists faced an uncanny range of unsolved problems: simple questions, such as why hot objects change color, … Read more