Physics and Astronomy Colloquia

Physics and Astronomy Colloquia take place most Fridays throughout the term from 3:30-4:30 pm in Wilder 104 unless otherwise noted. Colloquia are currently also available on Zoom. Department tea/coffee is 3:00 to 3:30 in Wilder 103 and discussion will follow the seminar at 4:45. Please check back frequently for updates to the schedule. Upcoming colloquia are also listed in the events section of the News and Events page . Colloquia prior to June 2017 are on the Colloquium Archives page .

Spring 2024

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
3/29/2024	Kevin Wright	Dartmouth College	Symmetry Breaking and Persistent Flow in Superfluid Circuits [ Video ]
4/3/2024	Glenn Starkman	CASE University	The Universe is not Isotropic [ Video ]
4/12/2024	Allison Youngblood	NASA GSFC	The Ultraviolet View of Stellar Activity [ Video ]
4/19/2024	PandA Postdocs' Day	Dartmouth College	A variety of Postdocs' research projects from Astronomy, Physics and Quantum
4/26/2024	Paul Sutter	Stony Brook University	Rescuing Science: Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt [ Video ]
5/24/2024	Rocky Kolb	University of Chicago	Schrödinger's Alarming Phenomenon of Particle Creation in the Expanding Universe [ Video ]

Winter 2024

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
1/5/2024	Claire Gasque	UC Berkeley	It's Not Easy Being Green: Unveiling an Imposter Aurora with Quantitative Modeling of Emissions Driven by Local Parallel Electric Fields [ Video ]
1/26/2024	Marcelo Gleiser	Dartmouth College	The Dawn of a Mindful Universe [ Video ]
2/2/2024	Jens Mahlmann	Columbia University	How magnetar magnetospheres erupt in electromagnetic fireworks [Video]
2/9/2024	Chen Shi	UCLA	Unveiling the key physical processes shaping the solar wind [ Video ]
2/16/2024	Colby Haggerty	University of Hawaii	The Importance of Energetic, Self-generated Particles on Collisionless Shock Waves in the Magnetosphere, the Solar Wind and Beyond [ Video ]
2/20/2024	Muni Zhou	IAS	Magnetogenesis in collisionless plasma --- how does the Universe magnetize? [ Video ]
2/23/2024	Xin An	UCLA	Electron precipitation into the Earth's atmosphere — from practical applications to basic physics [ Video ]

Fall 2023

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
9/22/2023	Salvatore Vitale	MIT	Gravitational-wave astrophysics, today and tomorrow [ Video ]
9/29/2023	Erin Kara	MIT	What happens when you throw something into a black hole? Probing the causal connection between inflow and outflow in accreting black holes. [ Video ]
10/6/2023	Paul Nation	IBM Quantum	Mitigating Measurement Errors on Quantum Computers [ Video ]
10/20/2023	Elisabeth Newton	Dartmouth College	Observing the Evolution of Stars and Planets [ Video ]
10/27/2023	Victor Acosta	University of New Mexico	Precision measurement and spectroscopy with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers in diamond [ Video ]
11/3/2023	Annika Peter	Ohio State University	Dark Matter Physics with Tiny Galaxies [ Video ]

Spring 2023

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
3/31/2023	Yi-Hsin Liu	Dartmouth College	Magnetic Explosions in Space [ Video ]
4/14/2023	Peter Maurer	University of Chicago	Interfacing Biomolecules with Coherent Quantum Sensors
4/21/2023	Gregory Fiete	Northeastern University	New Perspectives from Out-of-equilibrium Quantum Materials [ Video ]
5/5/2023	Shany Danieli	Princeton University	Low mass galaxies and their dark matter halos: lessons learned from satellite galaxies and the dynamics of globular clusters [ Video ]
5/12/2023	Joseph Maciejko	University of Alberta	Hyperbolic quantum matter [ Video ]
5/19/2023	Graduate Student Forum	Dartmouth College	Various Topics
5/26/2023	Ryan Hickox	Dartmouth College	The extremes of galaxy and black hole formation [ Video ]

Winter 2023

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
1/6/2023	David Kaiser	MIT	Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter Candidates [ Video ]
1/20/2023	Katelin Schutz	McGill University	Revealing hidden particles and forces with gravitational clues [ Video ]
1/27/23	Sasha Philippov	University of Maryland	Fireworks produced by extreme plasmas near neutron stars and black holes [ Video ]
2/3/2023	Dr. Alex Lupsasca	Vanderbilt University	The Black Hole Photon Ring [ Video ]
2/10/2023	Jonathan Friedman	Amherst College	When a clock (transition) is good for more than telling time [ Video ]
2/17/2023	Victor Galitski	University of Maryland	Many-Body Quantum Chaos and Emergence of Statistical Mechanics [ Video ]
2/24/2023	Eric Cornell	University of Colorado	Microhertz spectroscopy, teraelectronvolt physics, and the origin of matter: A measurement of the electron's electric dipole moment. [ Video ]

Fall 2022

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
9/16/2022	Gerald A. Goldin	Rutgers University	Quantum Kinematics, the Prediction of Anyons, and Some Wider Implications [ Video ]
9/23/2022	Mattias Fitzpatrick	Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College	Quantum Engineering with Superconducting Circuits [ Video ]
9/30/2022	Lina Necib	MIT	Tracing Dark Matter with Stars around the Milky Way [ Video ]
10/7/2022	Maria Kamenetska	Boston University	Towards molecular electronics with single molecule-metal junctions [ Video ]
11/4/2022	Scott C. Noble	NASA GSFC	Lighting Up Inspiraling Binary Black Hole Systems [ Video ]
11/11/2022	Andrew Vanderburg	MIT	A Song of Ice and Fire: the Fate of Planetary Systems After Stellar Death [ Video ]

Spring 2022

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
4/15/2022	Rodolfo Montez	Chandra X-Ray Center, Smithsonian Astrophysical Obs, Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics	X-ray Emission from the recurrent nova RS Oph ( Video )
4/21/2022	Fulvio Zonca	Center for Nonlinear Plasma Science and C.R. ENEA Frascati	Alfvénic Fluctuations and Alpha Particle Transport in Burning Plasmas ( Video )
4/29/2022	Brooke Russell	Berkeley Lab	Examining Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry with DUNE ( Video )
5/6/2022	Daniel Harlow	MIT	Symmetry in Quantum Gravity ( Video )
5/13/2022	Olga Goulko	UMass Boston	The Grasshopper Problem (Video)
5/20/2022	Susanne Yelin	UConn	Dense Arrays: A Novel Quantum Tool (Video)
5/27/2022	Matthew Zettergren	ERAU & Dartmouth College	Local-Scale Modeling of Terrestrial Ionosphere Coupling to the Atmosphere and Magnetosphere

Fall 2021

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
9/17/2021	Vinothan N. Manoharan	Harvard	The Physics of Virus Self-Assembly (Video)
9/24/2021	Phiala Shanahan	MIT	Proton and Nuclear Structure from the Standard Model (Video)
10/1/2021	Geoffroy Hautier	Dartmouth Thayer School of Engineering	Using quantum mechanics based computations (DFT) to search for new materials (Video)
10/8/2021	Julián B. Muñoz	Harvard	Cosmic Dawn: The Next Frontier in Cosmology (Video)
10/15/2021	Ryan Sweeney	MIT	Progress Towards Net Fusion Energy in SPARC (Video)
10/22/2021	Jillian Bellovary	Research Asssociate / AMNH Assistant Professor / CUNY-QCC	Seeking Massive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies (Video)
10/29/2021	Charles Brown	University of California, Berkeley	Probe of Band Structure Singularities with a Lattice-Trapped Quantum Gas (Video)
11/12/2021	Nicole Yunger Halpern	NIST QuICS University of Maryland	Quantum Steampunk: Quantum Information Meets Thermodynamics (Video)

Spring 2021 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
4/2/2021	Kristina Lynch	Dartmouth College	Auroral Reconstruction CubeSwarm – ARCS: A Heliophysics Mission Concept for Decoding the Aurora
4/9/2021	Cora Dvorkin	Harvard University	Discovering New Physics with Cosmological Data Sets
4/16/2021	Luca Amendola	University of Heidelberg (Germany)	Cosmology Without Assuming a Cosmology
4/23/2021	Alán Aspuru-Guzik	U of Toronto	What to do with a Near Term Quantum Computer? [ Video ]
4/30/2021	Lisa Kaltenegger	Carl Sagen Institute at Cornell	How to Find Life on Exoplanets [Video ]
5/7/2021	Norman Yao	UC Berkeley	Emergent hydrodynamics in a strongly interacting dipolar spin ensemble [Video ]
5/14/2021	David Alexander	Durham University	Why is color special? Identifying fundamental differences between red and blue quasars [ Video ]

Winter 2021 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
1/15/2021	Jenny Bergner	University of Chicago	The Volatile Reservoir of Planet-Forming Disks (Video)
1/22/2021	Mustafa Amin	Rice University	Smashing Solitons of Cosmology (Video)
1/29/21	Gourab Ghoshal	University of Rochester	A physics Approach to Study Urban Systems (Video)
2/5/2021	Sid Redner	Santa Fe Institute	Is Basketball Scoring Just a Random Walk? (Video)
2/19/2021	Caleb Scharf	Columbia University	As Worlds Turn (Video)
3/5/2021	Catherine Kealhofer	Williams College	Generating and Controlling Ultrafast Electron Pulses for Time-Resolved Electron Diffraction ( Video )

Fall 2020 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
9/18/2020	Keith Baker	Yale University	Quantum Entanglement in High Energy Physics at CERN's Large Hadron Collider ( Video )
10/23/2020	Jerry Goldstein	SWRI	Rediscovery of the Plasmasphere: History and Future of Plasmasphere Research
10/30/2020	Vivienne Baldassare	Washington State University	Searching for Supermassive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies ( Video )
11/6/2020	Geoff Crew	MIT Haystack Observatory	About that First Look at a Black Hole ( Video )
11/13/2020	Ketevi Adikle Assamagan	Brookhaven National Lab	Using the Higgs Boson to Search for Dark Sector Particles ( Video )

Spring 2020 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
4/3/2020	James D. Whitfield	Dartmouth College	Quantum Technology: Here and Now ( Video )
4/17/2020	Roger Melko	Perimeter Institute	Machine Learning the Quantum Many-Body Problem ( Video )
5/8/2020	Clara Sousa-Silva	MIT EAPS	Finding an Alien Biosphere with Computational Chemistry ( Video )
5/15/2020	Ana Maria Rey	JILA, University of Colorado Boulder	Observation of Dynamical Phase Transitions in Cold Atomic Gases ( Video )
5/22/2020	Daryl Haggard	McGill University	New Probes of Black Hole Variability ( Video )
5/29/2020	Marissa Giustina	Google LLC	Building Google’s Quantum Computer ( Video )

Winter 2020 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
1/10/2020	Brian Swingle	University of Maryland	Entangled Butterflies: Chaos in Complex Quantum Systems ( Video )
1/17/2020	Alexander Petroff	Clark University	Collective Dynamics of Fast Swimming Bacteria Near a Surface ( Video )
1/24/2020	Kerstin Perez	MIT	Scanning the Sky for Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter ( Video -- we unfortunately had technical issues this day so the slides are not visible)
1/31/2020	Claudio Chamon	Boston University	Path to Building Quantum Spin Liquids and Topological Qubits Within Existing Quantum Hardware ( Video )
2/7/2020	James Buckley	Washington University in St. Louis	Hedging One's Bets on Dark Matter ( Video )
2/21/2020	Rick Fienberg	American Astronomical Society	A Scientist's Guide to Interacting with the Media ( Video )
2/28/2020	John (Brad) Marston	Brown University	El Niño as a Topological Insulator: A Surprising Connection Between Climate, and Quantum, Physics ( Video )
3/6/2020	Sheperd Doeleman	Center for AstrophysicsHarvard & Smithsonian	Imaging a Black Hole with the Event Horizon Telescope

Fall 2019 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
9/20/2019	Kenneth Brown	Duke University	How to Construct a Quantum Computer
9/27/2019	Kimmy Wu	University of Chicago	Testing Inflation with the BICEP/Keck Array and South Pole Telescope ( Video )
10/4/2019	Fiona Harrison	Caltech	Science Highlights from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR): Bringing the High Energy Universe into Focus ( Video )
10/11/2019	Martin Greenwald	MIT	SPARC and the High-Field Path to Fusion Energy ( Video )
10/18/2019	Anson Hook	University of Maryland	The Theory and Search for Axions ( Video )
10/25/2019	Paola Cappellaro	MIT	How to Avoid HEATED Arguments Among Your Spins ( Video )
11/1/2019	Erich Osterberg	Dartmouth College	Hockey Sticks are Everywhere! The Recent Emergence of Climate Change in Greenland and New England ( Video )
11/8/2019	William Coish	McGill University	Topological Bound States and Topological Quantum Dynamics ( Video )
11/15/2019	Vladan Vuletic	MIT	Spin Squeezing in Optical-Clock Atoms ( Video )

Spring 2019 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
3/29/19	Chandrasekhar Ramanathan	Dartmouth College	Quantum Simulation and Sensing with Magnetic Resonance (Video)
4/5/19	David Hanneke	Amherst College	Driving Forbidden Vibrational Overtones in Molecular Ions (Video)
4/12/19	Anatoly Spitkovsky	Princeton University	Pulsar Magnetosphere: The Incredible Machine (Video)
4/19/19	Bruce Allen	AEI	The Direct Observation of Gravitational Waves (Video)
4/26/19	Tami Pereg-Barnea	McGill University	Topological States of Matter - Now What? (Video)
5/3/19	Marcel Agüeros	Columbia University	The Evolution of Cool Dwarf Spin Rate: Data, Models, and Tensions (Video)
5/10/19	Clayton Simien Daneesh Simien	Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham	Laser Spectroscopy and Cooling: Tools to Probe Fundamental Physics (Video of both talks) Next Generation Smart Materials: Understanding the Role of Homogeneous Nanomaterials For Materials Processing
5/17/19	Raymond Brock	Michigan State University	That Spin 0 Boson Changes Everything: The Future of the Energy Frontier in Particle Physics (Video)
5/24/19	Marc Swisdak	University of Maryland	Magnetic Reconnection and the Explosive Release of Plasma Energy (Video)

Winter 2019 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
1/4/19	Lauranne Lanz	Dartmouth College	Black Hole Feedback in Action? Investigating the Role of Supermassive Black Holes in Galaxy Evolution (Video)
1/18/19	Peter Johnson	Zapata Computing	Algorithmically Extending the Capabilities of Near-Term Quantum Computers (Video)
1/25/19	Wen Li	Boston University	Origin of Diffuse Aurora at Earth and Jupiter (Video not available)
2/1/19	Grant Tremblay	Harvard & Smithsonian	Galaxy-Scale Fountains with Black Hole Pumps (Video)
2/8/19	Chen-Yu Liu	Indiana University	Unresolved Problems in Neutron Decay (Video)
2/15/19	Sasha Tchekhovskoy	Northwestern University	Disks, Jets, and Other Black Hole-Powered Transients (Video)

Fall 2018 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
9/14/18	Kevin Wright	Dartmouth College	Shining a Light on the Mysterious World of Quantum Materials ( Video )
9/21/18	Anne Gelb	Dartmouth College	High Order Imaging Techniques for Synethetic Aperture Radar ( Video )
9/28/18	Jim Drake	University of Maryland	Magnetic Reconnection and Particle Acceleration in Space and Astrophysical Systems ( Video )
10/5/18	Carlos Meriles	CUNY City College of New York	Dynamic Nuclear Polarization Via Nitrogen-Vacancy in Diamond: Physics and Applications ( Video )
10/12/18	Benjamin Chandran	University of New Hampshire	The Parker Solar Probe and Origin of the Solar Wind ( Video )
10/26/18	Jim Binkoski	Dartmouth College	Is Spacetime a "Structural Quality of the Field"? ( Video )
11/2/18	David Grinspoon	Dartmouth College	Venus Missions: Past, Present, Planned and Pretend ( Video )

Spring 2018 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
3/30/18	Michael Andrews	WadeandWendy.ai	A Physics Education and Beyond (Video)
4/6/18	Raffi Budakian	University of Waterloo	Nanometer-Scale Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy
4/13/18	Chih-Chun Chien	University of California, Merced	Quantum Transport in Ultracold Atoms ( Video )
4/20/18	Sally Dawson	Brookhaven National Laboratory	Precision Measurements for the LHC ( Video )
4/27/18	Jure Zupan	University of Cincinnati	News From Particle Physics Precision Frontier ( Video )
5/4/18	Nuno Loureiro	MIT	New Insights Into Plasma Turbulence ( Video )
5/11/18	Valerio Faraoni	Bishop's University	Modifying Gravity to Explain the Cosmic Acceleration ( Video )
5/18/18	Anne White	MIT	Understanding Cold-Pulse Dynamics in Tokamak Plasmas Using Local Turbulent Transport Models ( Video )
5/25/18	Masahiro Morii	Harvard University	Experimental Searches for Dark Matter ( Video )

Winter 2018 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Topic
1/5/18	Joshua Burger	University of Wisconsin-Madison	Hunting for Dark Matter (Video)
1/12/18	Richard Kremer	Dartmouth College	Dartmouth and its Shattuck Observatory: Science and Identity at a 'Small College' From 1848 to 2018 (Video)
1/19/18	James Lowenthal	Smith College	How Astronomers Are Saving the World and the Sky (Video)
1/26/18	Alexander Smith	Dartmouth College	Quantizing Time ( Video )
2/2/18	Elisabeth Newton	MIT	The Astrophysics of the Smallest Stars and Their Planets (Video)
2/5/18	Joseph Rodriguez	Harvard University	Transiting Planets and Eclipsing Disks as a Guide for Planet Formation (Video)
2/9/18	Kristin McQuinn	University of Texas at Austin	The Low-Mass Galaxy Frontier
2/12/18	Abigail Vieregg	University of Chicago	Discovering the Highest Energy Neutrinos Using Radio Detection Techniques
2/16/18	Jedidah Isler	Vanderbilt University	Blazar Astrophysics in the 2020s: Building the Case Now for the Observations of the Future
2/23/18	Jason Dexter	MPE Garching	Resolving Black Holes in Space and Time
3/9/18	Mark Hertzberg	Tufts University	The Accelerating Universe and Relativity (Video)

Fall Term

Fall 2017 Colloquia

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Topic
9/15/17	Ken Van Tilberg	IAS	Tabletop Searches for Ultralight Dark Matter (Video)
9/22/17	Roberto Onofrio	Dartmouth, University of Padua	Higgs, Weak Interactions and Gravitation (Video)
9/29/17	Douglas Finkbeiner	Harvard	The Search for WIMP Dark Matter: New Approaches to Stubborn Problems (Video)
10/6/17	Matthew Schwartz	Harvard	Machine Learning and the Large Hadron Collider ( Video )
10/13/17	Robyn Millan	Dartmouth	Dynamics of Radiation Belt Electrons and the BARREL Experiment (Video)
10/20/17	Subir Sachdev	Harvard	Quantum Matter Without Quasiparticles: Strange Metals and Black Holes (Video)
10/27/17	Moira Gresham	Whitman College	Beyond the WIMP Dark Matter Paradigm: Asymmetric Dark Matter Nuclei (Video)
11/3/17	Joseph Formaggio	MIT	Weighing Neutrinos (Video)
11/10/17	Nuno Loureiro	MIT/PSFC	New Insights Into Plasma Turbulence (Cancelled)
11/17/17	Jun Ye	Univ. of Colorado, JILA, NIST	Atomic Clock Based on Quantum Matter

Admissions

Academics

Campus Life

More