Events

Correlations - intended as multiple-nucleon mechanisms that cannot be modelled by a pure mean-field potential - are the backbone of our deeper understanding of atomic nuclei. They are manifest in the fragmentation of the spectral strength which is encountered in one-nucleon addition and removal measurements.

In this talk I will describe how combining ultrafast lasers and electron microscopes in novel ways makes it possible to directly ‘watch’ the time-evolving structure of condensed matter on the fastest timescales open to atomic motion.  By combining such measurements with complementary (and more conventional) spectroscopic probes one can develop structure-property relationships for materials under even very far from equilibrium conditions.

This talk is part of the Physics and Astronomy Education Group's brown-bag teaching series. Please feel free to bring your lunch. Coffee and cookies will be provided.

Abstract: The thermal Hall conductance is a universal and topological property which characterizes the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) state. Quantized values of the thermal Hall conductance has only recently been measured experimentally in integer quantum Hall (IQH) and FQH regimes,

Understanding how stars form out of diffuse interstellar gas is a problem that underlies much of modern astrophysics, from the formation of planets to the chemical evolution of our universe.  A key outstanding question is whether magnetic fields contribute to the observed low efficiency of the star-formation process.  In this talk, I will discuss what we have learned about the role played by magnetic fields in star formation, with a particular focus on results from the BLASTPol balloon-borne sub-mm polarimeter.

Searches for high energy signatures from beyond the standard model physics have advanced greatly, but a lot of ground remains to be covered for soft, low energy signals. In the context of dark matter direct detection, future single-phonon detectors will be sensitive to dark matter with a mass as low as roughly 10 keV. In this regime, the conventional nuclear recoil picture no longer applies and new theoretical tools are needed to correctly calculate the scattering rate.

Bubble chambers have a long history of use in particle physics, starting with being used for particle discovery in the 1950s and moving through to their use in dark matter search experiments today. The many different target fluids which have been used have provided great flexibility in the use of this technology. In this talk I will start with a very brief history of these detectors and quickly move on to their use in the PICO experiment. After discussion of the stages and plans for that collaboration, a possibility of future improvements to the bubble chamber will be presented.

Please come and support our students as they give 3-minute presentations of their thesis projects, as part of the international "3MT" competition!

Majorana fermions can be realized as quasiparticle excitations in a topological superconductor, whose non-Abelian statistics provide a route to developing robust qubits. In this context, there has been a recent surge of interest in the iron-based superconductor, FeSe0.5Te0.5. Theoretical calculations have shown that FeSe0.5Te0.5 may have an inverted band structure which may lead to topological surface states, which can in turn host Majorana modes under certain conditions in the superconducting phase.

The gamma-ray tracking array GRETINA has completed a variety of experiments at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University. An overview will be presented, showing selected results covering broad topics from nuclear structure physics to nuclear astrophysics.

More than 95% of the stars in the Universe will eventually end up as white dwarf stars. Although they are currently more numerous than all the stars with 1 solar mass and above combined, they receive a relatively small share of the astronomical community attention (unless they happen to explode as a type Ia supernova). Yet, these fascinating objects have a lot to teach us about stellar evolution, planets, fundamental physics and much more.

I was a physics/math major at UBC and spent 7 years doing cosmology research before joining Google in 2015 to work as a software engineer. I'll try to summarize the career wisdom I picked up along the way, give advice on how to get a job as a software engineer, and paint a picture of daily life working for a large internet company with a goofy name. I'll also give an overview of the sorts of problems software engineers get to tackle, and how they compare to the problems you get to work on in P&A.

Four fifths of the matter in the universe consist of something completely different from the "ordinary matter" we know and love. I will explain why this "dark matter" is an unavoidable ingredient to understand the universe as we observe it, and I will describe what the fundamental, particle nature of the dark matter could possibly be. I will then give an overview of strategies to search for dark matter as a particle, describe a few examples of possible hints of discovery, and outline ways forward in this exciting hunt.

It may well be that mankind has understood only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the nature of matter. Densely many body entangled compressible states of matter may exist exhibiting entirely different physical behaviors compared to the "classical" short ranged entangled product state stuffs from the high energy- and condensed matter textbooks.

Cosmological simulations can now make specific and detailed predictions for the shapes, masses, and substructure fractions in galactic dark matter halos: predictions that depend on the dark matter model assumed. Comparing these predictions to the observed mass distributions of galaxies should in principle lead to constraints on the nature of dark matter, but observable dynamical tracers can be scarce in regions where the dark matter distribution is best able to discriminate between models.

Stephanie Geoffrion will share her career path as a spacecraft systems engineer for three different aerospace companies, including SpaceX. Stephanie’s role at SpaceX was multi-faceted, with her acting as a liaison between SpaceX and the engineers at NASA who work on the International Space Station. She ensured that all aspects of the interface between SpaceX's Dragon space capsule and the space station were understood, implemented and verified before flight.