Research Jamboree! A deep dive into diverse research fields

Introduction:

Our annual Research Jamboree is geared towards grad and undergrad students interested in research opportunities at PHAS. Faculty will briefly outline their research areas and student needs. Bring your questions!

Speaker list and abstracts:

1. Alannah Hallas: From structure to function in quantum materials

Quantum materials are solids that have remarkable mechanical, electrical, and magnetic properties derived from intense quantum mechanical effects. In the Hallas group, we seek to discover new quantum materials using the tools of crystal growth and to uncover their nature using muons, neutrons, and x-rays as probes. The ultimate goal of this research is to understand and control the materials that will unlock next generation technologies.

2. Cindy Shaheen (Sabrina Leslie Lab): Single-molecule biophysics: towards understanding living systems and therapies one molecule at a time

Why: Our world is a molecular world. Overcoming global health challenges requires the constant development of new therapies and vaccines to treat diseases and viruses, as well as new products for aiding agriculture and healing the environment. This requires advancing our characterization and understanding of the underlying complex series of molecular reactions, which occur one molecule at a time, with new biophysical tools.

What: At Leslie Lab, we are advancing the field by contributing new single-molecule and single-cell imaging methods and insights which are capable of advancing our understanding of these complex reactions, and connecting these insights to real-world results. We combine our unique imaging data which tells a “story” of the journey of a molecule/particle/drug as it enters a cell, with other forms of data such as genomic and proteomic data, to understand how life works at the finest scale.

How: Our team of biophysicists including graduate students in Physics, Chemistry, Biochemistry and Engineering, engages in collaborative innovation and research with diverse researchers, based at UBC as well as at the BC Cancer Agency, industry, and internationally, and together we aim to help advance the forefronts of biophysics research as well as global health and wellbeing.

3. Chris Hearty: Searching for new physics as a graduate student on Belle II

The Belle II experiment is located at the SuperKEKB e+ e- particle collider in Tsukuba Japan. It has unique sensitivity to new particles that are not part of the Standard Model of particle physics, including the possibility of being the first experiment to establish the production of dark matter in the laboratory.

4. Valery Milner: Title: Probing Many-body Quantum Systems with Molecular Rotors

We use an advanced laser tool, known as an “optical centrifuge”, to control the rotation of molecules with laser light. We study the dynamics of centrifuged molecular “super-rotors” inside strongly interacting many-body quantum systems, such as superfluid liquid helium.

5. Allison Man/Lucas Kuhn: Galaxy evolution across cosmic time

The UBC Extragalactic Astrophysics group uses telescope observations to investigate the myriad physical processes that drive galaxy evolution. I’ll provide an overview of our research questions, methods, activities, and potential projects.

6. Chloé Malbrunot/Doug Bryman: RARE & PRECIOUS (& PRECISE)! How rare decays could reveal cracks in the standard model of particle physics

I’ll present the activities of the UBC/TRIUMF rare decay group. In particular I’ll highlights our involvements in previous, current and future experiments at CERN, TRIUMF and PSI (Switzerland). I’ll show how pion and kaon rare decays can be exciting unique probes to new physics.

7. Steve Plotkin: Recent Biophysics Inventions and Discoveries in the Plotkin Lab

Some recent discoveries that we have made in our research programs will be described. These will include Shawn Hsueh's and Santanu Sasidharan's use of synthetic biology to design novel therapeutics for COVID, as well as several surprises that Pranav Garg and Gabriel Dall'Alba have found after we sequenced the genome of a primordial comb jelly, now thought to be the earliest branching multicellular animal on the tree of life.

8. Andrew Potter: Realizing dynamical phases of quantum matter in trapped-ions

I will present highlights about engineering two new dynamical phases of matter in trapped-ion "spin" chains: i) a time-crystal: a phase of matter that spontaneously breaks time-translation symmetry, and ii) a dynamical topological phase in a quasi-periodically driven spin chain that exhibits emergent encoded edge qubits that are dynamically protected from a large class of errors. These phases are fundamentally forbidden in thermal equilibrium and rely crucially on the use of strong-driving and disorder-induced localization to prevent the ions from relaxing to equilibrium. I will discuss challenges for realizing these phases in solid-state systems where they could be converted into devices.