Physics Colloquium

All are welcome at the Physics Department Colloquium talks. They occur nearly every Wednesday at 4:00 during the semester, in person in the Marshak Science Building, room 418N, and by zoom.

For details please contact Sriram Ganeshan at sganeshan@ccny.cuny.edu

 

 

FALL 2024 Colloquium Schedule

September 4, 2024
Dr. Saurabh W. Jha
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Piscataway, New Jersey 
Title: White Dwarf Supernovae: Astrophysics and Cosmology 

September 11, 2024
Dr. Johannes Hofmann
University of Gothenburg
Sweden
Title to be announced 

September 18, 2024
Dr. Benjamin Schuster
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Piscataway, New Jersey 
Title to be announced 

September 25, 2024
Dr. Niranjan Shivaram
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN
Title to be announced 

October 2, 2024
No Colloquium 

October 9, 2024
Dr. Jonathan Pelliciari
Brookhaven National Laboratory 
Upton, NY

Title: Using Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering to study quantum materials

Modern light sources like the NSLS-II at Brookhaven National Lab deliver bright tunable photons in a wide range of energies from the THz regime up to 100 keV. This allowed the development of scattering techniques relying on the use of atomic resonances enabling the access to the electronic degrees of freedom in materials. Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering (RIXS) is one of these techniques and thanks to the massive development in instrumentation and theory is playing a significant role in the study of quantum materials with contributions in multiple fields such as superconductivity, quantum magnetism, 2D materials, and lately single photon emission. The sensitivity of RIXS to bosonic excitations of different nature (spin, orbital, lattice, and charge) can provide microscopic information on materials as a function of energy and momentum. In my seminar I will start by introducing RIXS its capabilities and limitations, followed by a description of the experimental components needed to perform high-resolution RIXS and the solution that we developed at BNL. I will then move forward by highlighting three scientific cases in different fields. The first will involve our investigations on superconducting infinite layer nickelates where we studied the evolution of the spin dynamics across the superconducting dome akin to past studies on the cuprates. The second case regards the study of quantum emitters in hBN where in collaboration with CUNY we could unveil vibronic states and connect them to the signals detected in photoluminescence possibly identifying N2 molecular vibrations as the key for the emergence of quantum emission. Finally, I will conclude by highlighting one of our studies on excitons in 2D van der Waals magnets where we could detect their nature, evolution as a function of charge transfer energy (and hybridization), and their dispersion in momentum space.

October 16, 2024
Dr. Kenneth Burch
Boston College
Boston, MA

Title: Post Pandemic Tool for Quantum Materials and vice-versa

Raman scattering, invented at the end of the last pandemic, can provide a wealth of information on the fractional, magnetic, lattice, and charge excitations at the heart of quantum materials and devices. After a brief overview of the technique and its power, I will focus on our recent discovery of the Axial Higgs Mode via Quantum interference. Here a new quasi-particle emerges from the combination of quantum geometry and strong correlations. This demonstrates the power of Raman to reveal the vector properties of a low energy mode and heralds the discovery of the first unconventional charge density wave and multi-component symmetry-breaking transition. Time permitting, I will discuss our efforts to use quantum materials in biosensing to help prevent the next pandemic.

October 23, 2024
Dr. John Terilla
Queens College, CUNY Graduate Center
New York, NY

Title: Mathematical and physical ideas in the foundations of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract: I’ll begin with a quick review of some physical ideas involved in the
foundations of AI, touching on the work acknowledged in the 2024 Nobel prize in
Physics. Moving forward to today’s state of the art language models, I’ll say something
about how physical ideas are relevant. To get an idea, think of a text character like a
particle that can occupy one of a finite collection of states (the letter “A”, the letter “T”,
the number “7”, …). Then, interpret samples of natural language as observations of a
one-dimensional system of interacting particles.

I’ll review some of the engineering developments leading to the LLMs in use today and
argue that the mathematical structures at work behind the scenes are consistent with
this physical view and shed a little light, not just on how LLMs work, but how human
language itself might work.

October 30, 2024
No Colloquium 

November 6, 2024                    
Dr. Justin H. Wilson
Assistant Professor
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA

Title: "Exploring Low-Energy Systems by Analogy to the Geometry of Spacetime"

Abstract: Analog gravity is an approach that uses low-energy systems built and controlled in the lab to uncover connections to gravitational phenomena. By drawing parallels between these accessible systems and the geometry of spacetime, we gain new insights into both gravitational physics and the underlying behavior of these systems. The talk begins by connecting the equivalence principle to the observations in the comoving frame of a fluid, then extends this analogy to quantum fluids—of light, atoms, electrons, and more—where phenomena like spontaneous Hawking radiation emerge naturally. In the latter part of the talk, we will focus on Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) as ideal environments for exploring these phenomena, including how they can mimic an inflationary universe and reveal features beyond the cosmic microwave background. Time permitting, we will also examine how more exotic spacetimes can emerge in these BECs, with geometries resembling Newtonian gravity rather than Einstein’s.
 

November 13, 2024
Dr. Thomas Weinacht
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY

Title: Developing an Ultrafast Quantum Camera

Abstract: The flow of energy in molecules is of fundamental importance for vision, photosynthesis and light harvesting of solar energy.  The interplay between electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom is key to guiding this energy flow, but is not well understood in most systems of interest. I will discuss the development of molecular imaging techniques and time resolved spectroscopies that allow us to take pictures of molecules in motion so that we can follow the dynamics initiated by the absorption of light, and understand how this leads to physical, chemical and biological changes.  

November 20, 2024
Dr. Xu Du
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY

Title: Building artificial atom and beyond with graphene quantum Hall antidot

Abstract: Two-dimensional electron system in quantizing magnetic fields has been a unique platform for studying exotic quasiparticles resulting from the quantum Hall effect, enhancing our understanding of the strongly interacting electrons and nontrivial quantum statistics. A particularly interestingexperimental approach for such study is the quantum Hall antidot in which the edge modes encircle an electrostatic potential hill form “artificial atom” with closed orbits and quantized energy levels, allowing localizing individual quantum Hall quasiparticles and provide the basis for their manipulations. Coupling quantum Hall antidot states forms more complex quantum systems which potentially allow to study interactions/correlations and quantum exchange statistics of the quantum Hall quasiparticles. I will present an overview of our recent efforts on developing graphene-based controllable quantum Hall antidots, quasiparticle charge measurements and realization of individual localized quantum Hall exciton. These developments open the opportunities for studying the exotic quasiparticles and strongly correlated electrons in 2d systems. 

November 27, 2024
No Colloquium 

December 4, 2024 

Dr. Daniel Kabat
Lehman College, CUNY
New York, NY

Title: Causality and faster-than-light travel on a moving brane
 
Abstract: Causality is a sacred principle of physics.  Events can be separated into causes and effects, and causes always happen before effects. Causality is usually equivalent to the statement that nothing can travel faster than light. But is that always the case?  We'll test this in the setting of a 4-D universe moving through a larger 5-D spacetime. We'll see that from the 4-D point of view causality allows for faster-than-light travel. Causality even allows signals to travel backwards in time!  These counter-intuitive phenomena are consequences of the interplay of special relativity in 4-D and 5-D.
 

December 11, 2024
No Colloquium 

FALL 2023 Colloquium Schedule

August 30, 2023
Dr. Derek S. Wang
Research Scientist
IBM Quantum
New York, NY
Title to be announced

September 6, 2023

September 13, 2023
Dr. Charles D. Brown II
Assistant Professor
Department of Physics
Yale University, New Haven, CT
Title to be announced

September 20, 2023

September 27, 2023

October 4, 2023

October 11, 2023

October 18, 2023
Dr. Bruno Uchoa
Associate Professor, Ted and Cuba Webb Presidential Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK
Title to be announced

October 25,  2023

November 1, 2023

November 8, 2023

November 15, 2023

November 22, 2023 - No Colloquium

November 29, 2023

December 6, 2023

 

SPRING 2023 Colloquium Schedule

February 1, 2023
Dr. Victor Galitsky
Professor and Chesapeake Chair
Physics Department
University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Emergence of Statistical Mechanics via Spontaneous Breaking of Unitarity

February 8, 2023
Dr. Iva Brezinova
Assistant Professor
Institute for Theoretical Physics
Vienna University Technology (TU Wien)
Tackling time-dependent quantum many body systems with reduced density matrices

February 15, 2023
Dr. Felix Parra Diaz
Professor and Head of the Theory Department
Professor of Astrophysical Science
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Theory and computation of magnetic confinement fusion
 

February 22, 2023
Dr. Jennifer Cano
Assistant Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY
Affiliate Associate Research Scientist
CCQ, Flatiron Institute, New York, NY
The Search for Topological Materials
 

March 1, 2023
Dr. Matthew Dawber
Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY

Building better functional materials with advanced deposition and x-ray diffraction
 

March 8, 2023
No colloquium, APS March Meeting
 

March 15, 2023
Dr. David Grier
Professor, Department of Physics
Director of the Center for Soft Matter Research
New York University, New York, NY
Tractor Beams and Related Topological Waves
 

March 22, 2023
Dr. Philip S. Lukeman 
Associate Professor 
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences 
St. John’s University, Queens, NY
Multiscale Polyvalent Biosensing using DNA Nanotechnology & Electrochemistry  

March 29, 2023
Dr. Barry Bradlyn
Assistant Professor
The Grainger School of Engineering, Physics
University of Illinois, Urbana, IL
A New Spin on Topological Quantum Chemistry
 

April 5, 2023
No colloquium, Spring Recess

April 12, 2023
No colloquium, Spring Recess

April 19, 2023
Dr. Robert Konik
Physicist, Chair, Condensed Matter Physics and
Materials Science Department
Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY
Title to be announced

SPECIAL EVENT: ASRC Auditorium
The Henry Semat Lecture
April 26, 2023
Dr. Luis Alvarez-Gaume
Professor/Director Simons Center for Geometry and Physics
Stony Brook
"News from the Cosmos: the Unsettling Universe"

May 3, 2023
Dr. Shlomo Havlin
Professor
Department of Physics
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
"Independent Networks Yield Novel Physical Phase Transitions"
 

May 10, 2023
Dr. Kevin J. Sung
IBM Quantum
New York, NY
How to get good results from noisy quantum processors

 

FALL 2022 Colloquium Schedule

August 31, 2022
V. Parameswaran Nair
Distinguished Professor
Department of Physics
The City College of the City University of New York
Comments and ideas on gravity and noncommutative spaces

September 7, 2022
Raquel Queiroz
Assistant Professor of Physics
Department of Physics
Columbia University
New York, NY
A local view on topology

September 14, 2022
Thomas Iadecola
Assistant Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa
Simulating Quantum Dynamics at the Dawn of Quantum Computing

September 21, 2022
Susanne Yelin
Professor of Physics in Residence
Department of Physics
Harvard, Cambridge, MA 
Dense arrays: A novel quantum tool

September 28, 2022
Neelima Sehgal
Associate Professor
Physics and Astronomy Department,
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY
Mapping Dark Matter on Large and Small Scales with the Cosmic Microwave Background


October 12, 2022
Kaden Hazzard
Associate Professor
Physics and Astronomy
Rice University, Houston, TX
Programmable quantum matter with real and synthetic dimensions


October 19, 2022
Anthony Pullen
Assistant Professor
Arts and Science
New York University, New York, NY
Realistic inference models for line intensity mapping 
 

October 26, 2022
Manas Kulkarni
International Center for Theoretical Sciences--Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Bengaluru - 560 089, India
Non-Hermitian random matrices and open quantum systems


November 2, 2022
Chandra Varma
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA
One hundred and eleven years of superconductivity

November 9, 2022
Paul Goldbart
Professor
Department of Physics & Astronomy
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY
Random networks, classical and quantal
 

November 16, 2022: By zoom only.  Please contact Prof. Sriram Ganeshan for details: sganeshan@ccny.cuny.edu
Ching-Hua Lee 
Assistant Professor 
Department of Physics 
National University of Singapore 
Realizing topological states on a quantum computer

November 30, 2022
Sang-Hyuk Lee
Assistant Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine
Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
Lights, Camera, Action! Shining light on biomolecular dynamics and interactions with optical microscopy

CANCELED: December 7, 2022
Iva Brezinova
Assistant Professor
Institute for Theoretical Physics
Vienna University Technology (TU Wien)
Tackling time-dependent quantum many body systems with reduced density matrices

SPRING 2022 Colloquium Schedule

January 17, 2022
IUSL/Optica Physics Colloquium
David Silverstein
Graduate Student working at Biolingual, LLC
From Majorana Particles to Topological Quantum Computers- Bringing Together Theory and Experiment

 

February 2, 2022
Yohannes Abate
Department of Physics and Astronomy 
University of Georgia. Athens, GA 

Probing interactions at the nanoscale

 

February 9, 2022
Moshe Gai
Professor
Department of Physics
University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

Stellar Evolution in the Light of Gamma Beams

 

February 16, 2022
Ronald Koder
Associate Professor of Physics 
The City College of the City University of New York

 
Utilizing disorder in natural and designed proteins and enzymes

 

March 2, 2022
Tomer Markovich
Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for Theoretical Biological Physics
Rice University, Houston, TX

Odd Viscosity in Active Matter

 

March 9, 2022
Arthur J. van der Est
Professor of Chemistry and
Adjunct Professor of Physics  
Brock University, Ontario, Canada
 
Electron spin polarization in rigid, coupled  triplet-doublet pairs

 

March 23, 2022
Ian Stewart
Emeritus Professor of Mathematics
University of Warwick, England

Synchrony and Phase Relations in Network Dynamics

March 30, 2022
Nathalie de Leon
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering 
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 

Correlating materials analysis with qubit measurements to systematically eliminate sources of noise

 

April 13, 2022
Shinsei Ryu
Professor of Physics
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Many-body quantum physics through the lens of quantum entanglement

 

The Inaugural Harry Lustig Lecture

April 27, 2022
4:00 p.m. to 5:15 p.m.
Advanced Science Research Center Auditorium
85 St. Nicholas Avenue
New York, NY 10031
 

Arthur I. MIller
Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science
University College London (UCL)

Can AI be the Next Picasso?

 

 

 

May 4, 2022
Andrew J. Millis
Professor of Physics, Department of Physics
Columbia University
CCQ Co-Director, Flatiron Institute
New York, NY

"The 'Mott' metal insulator transition: Is it real, and does it occur in real materials?" 

FALL 2021 Colloquium Schedule

August 25, 2021
Stuart Samuel
Professor Emeritus
Physics Department, City College of New York

The Resolution of the Measurement Problem in Unitary Quantum Field Theory

 

September 1, 2021
Joseph Falson
Assistant Professor of Materials Science
Department of APplied Physics and Materials Science
California Instiute of Technology, Pasadena, CA

Apparent zero field breakdown of the Fermi liquid in an oxide two-dimensional electron system 

 

September 22, 2021
Leonardo Rastelli
Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY

Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps in quantum gravity.

 

September 29, 2021
Debanjan Chowdhary
Assistant Professor
Department of Physics
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Continuous Mott Transition in Moiré Heterostructures

 

October 13, 2021
Jacqueline Faherty
Senior Scientist and Senior Education Manager
American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY

Tales in stellar motion

 

October 20, 2021
Archana Kamel
Assistant Professor
University of Massachusetts Lowell, 

Generating and characterizing correlations in noisy quantum systems

 

October 27, 2021

Zubin Jacob
Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

Atomistic Topological Electrodynamics: Optical-N Insulator

 

November 3, 2021

Hitesh J. Changlani
Assistant Professor
Department of Physics
Florida State University and National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
Tallahasee, FL

The quantum many-body problem and what are we doing to solve it

 

November 10, 2021
Dr. Areg Ghazaryan
ISTplus Fellow, Institute of Science and Technology (IST), Austria

Magnetism and superconductivity in rhombohedral trilayer graphene