Physics & Astronomy

Colloquium
Thursdays, 4:00-5:00 pm
1-425 Physics and Astronomy (map)
Reception from 3:30-4:00
(unless posted otherwise)

For more information,
contact David Saltzberg

2009: | Winter | Spring | Fall |

2008: | Winter | Spring | Fall |

2007: | Winter | Spring | Fall |

2006: | Winter | Spring | Fall |

2005: | Winter | Spring | Fall |

2004: | Winter | Spring | Fall |

2003: | Winter | Spring | Fall |




	Fall 2009
	October 1 Martin Simon (UCLA) The Great California Shakeout. Are you Prepared? October 8 Thomas Murphy (UCSD) Testing Gravity via Lunar Laser Ranging October 15 Benjamin Zuckerman (UCLA) The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe ("SETI"), and Why It Will Fail October 22 Michael McNitt-Gray (UCLA) Key Issues in Medical X-ray Computed Tomography: Radiation Dose, Image Quality and the Tradeoffs Between Them October 29 Slava Turyshev (NASA/JPL) Anomalous Dynamics in the Solar System: Investigation of the Pioneer and Earth Flyby Anomalies November 5 Michael Jura (UCLA) The Composition of Extrasolar Minor Planets November 12 Roman Jackiw (MIT) Fractional Charge November 19 Paul S. Weiss (UCLA) Quantitative Measurements of Adsorbate Interactions and Dynamics: Potentials and Functional Properties December 3 Jan Liphardt (UC Berkeley) Self-Organization of the Escherichia coli Chemotaxis Network Imaged with Super-Resolution Light Microscopy

	Spring 2009
	April 2 Dave DeMille (Yale) Diatomic Molecules as Quantum Tools April 9 Lisa Randall (Harvard) Searching for Warped Geometry at the LHC April 16 Steve Kivelson (Stanford) Electronic Liquid Crystals April 23 Andrew Cohen (Boston University) Electroweak Superconductivity April 30 Per Kraus (UCLA) Black Holes: Theory and Applications May 7 Mayank Mehta (Brown University) Neurophysics of Learning Causality: Space, Time, Oscillations and Sleep May 14 Erich Poppitz (University of Toronto) The Wonders of Supersymmetry: from Quantum Mechanics, Topology, and Noise, to (maybe) the LHC May 21 Albert Libchaber (Rockefeller) The Origin of Life: from Geophysics to Biology? May 28 Amir Yacoby (Harvard) Spins and Charges in Low Dimensions June 4 Jim Hudspeth (Rockefeller) Making an Effort to Listen: Mechanical Amplication by Myosin Molecules and Ion Channels in Hair Cells of the Inner Ear

	Winter 2009
	January 8 H. Jeff Kimble (Caltech) Quantum Networks January 15 David Mao (Carnegie Institution of Washington) Pressure: A New Dimension in the Physical Sciences January 22 Dmitri Kharzeev (BNL) Parity Violation in Super-dense Matter at RHIC January 29 Matthias Troyer (Physics, ETH Zurich) Validating a Quantum Simulator: Do Ultra-cold Atomic Gases Live up to Their Promise? February 5 Sir Anthony J. Leggett (Nobel Laureate, Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Bell's Theorem: Entanglement, Quantum Teleportation, Quantum Cryptography, Quantum Computing and All That February 12 Paul Selvin (University of Illinois,Urbana) FIONA Looks at Individual Molecular Motors Walk and Run February 19 Carlos Portera-Cailliau (UCLA Medical School) In Vivo 2-photon Calcium Imaging of Network Activity in Developing Neocortex February 26 Joshua Frieman (Fermilab and University of Chicago) The Accelerating Universe: A Decade On March 5 Doug Bonn (UBC) Recent Progress in Understanding High Temperature Superconductivity: High Purity Materials meet High magnetic Fields March 12 Harald Fritzsch (Ludwig-Maximilians, University in Munich Germany) Fundamental Constants in Physics and their Time Dependence

	Fall 2008
	October 2 Eric Hudson (UCLA) Ultracold Production and Trapping for Ground State RbCs Molecules October 16 Steve Furlanetto (UCLA) Peering into the Dark Ages October 23 Yaroslav Tserkovnyak (UCLA) Spin-electronics October 30 Thomas Mason (UCLA) Production, Manipulation, and Assembly of Custom-Shaped Colloids November 6 Bob Cousins (UCLA) First Beams in the CMS Detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN November 13 Chan Joshi (Electrical Engineering, UCLA) Surfing Plasma Waves: A new paradigm for Particle Accelerators November 20 John Miao (UCLA) Lensless Diffraction Microscopy: Seeing the Invisible with Computational Algorithms December 4 Moses Chan (Penn State) Can a solid be “superfluid”?

	Spring 2008
	April 3 Gary Williams (UCLA) Vortex Loops and the Superfluid Phase Transition April 10 O.W. Greenberg (University of Maryland) The Discovery of Color, A Personal Perspective April 17 Gerald A. Miller (University of Washington) A New Look at the Neutron and Proton April 24 Leonid Glazman (Yale) Inelastic Electron Scattering Off Magnetic Impurities May 1 Ed Moses (Lawrence Livermore Laboratory) The National Ignition Facility: Its Role in Fusion Energy and the Emerging Field of High Energy Density Science May 8 Diandra Leslie-Pelecky (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) Physics of NASCAR May 13 Keith Hodgson (Stanford University) Photon Science and the Coming Revolution Enabled by X-ray Free Electron Lasers May 22 Keith Hodgson (Stanford University) Photon Science and the Coming Revolution Enabled by X-ray Free Electron Lasers May 29 Henri Alloul, Regent Lecturer (Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Univ. Paris-Sud) June 5 Alfred Wong (UCLA) TBA

	Winter 2008
	January 10 Jack Feldman, Neurobiology (UCLA) A Physicist Looks for Inspiration January 17 Alexander Kusenko (UCLA) Neutrinos: the Dark Side of the Light Fermions January 24 Ed Turner (Princeton) Detecting Extrasolar Planets, Plants and Beaches January 31 Shoucheng Zhang (Stanford University) Quantum spin Hall Effect February 7 Dr. J. Murray Gibson, Assoc. Director (Argonne National Lab) Imaging with X-Rays at the Advanced Photon Source(APS): Today and Tomorrow February 14 Claudio Pellegrini (UCLA) The X-ray Free-electron Laser: A Super Video Vamera toStudy Matter with Atomic Space-time Resolution February 21 Max Tegmark (MIT) New Clues about Inflation, Dark Matter and Dark Energy February 28 Rosemary Wyse (Johns Hopkins University) The Properties of Dark Matter on Small Spatial Scales March 6 William Rippard (NIST) Controlling and Manipulating Nanomagnets with DC Spin-polarized Currents

	Fall 2007
	October 4 Stanley Osher (UCLA) Mathematics in the Real World and the Fake World October 11 Troy Carter (UCLA) An Overview of Fusion Energy Research: Taming Turbulence and Transport in Magnetized Plasmas October 18 Rainer S. Wallny (UCLA) The Top Quark: A Window to the Unknown October 25 Rocky Kolb (University of Chicago) Taking Sides on Dark Energy November 1 Vladimir Vassiliev (UCLA) VERITAS & the Future of Ultra High Energy Gamma Rays November 8 Juan Maldacena (Institute for Advanced Study) QCD, Strings and Black Holes: A Duality between Gravity and Field Theory November 15 Katsushi Arisaka (UCLA) Origin of the Most Energetic Particles in Universe: New Results from Pierre-Auger November 29 Stuart Freedman (Berkeley) Direct Evidence for Neutrino Oscillations with KamLand December 6 Mark Konishi (CalTech)

	Spring 2007
	April 5 Gerald Gabrielse (Harvard) New Measurement of the Electron Magnetic Moment and the Fine Structure Constant April 12 Michael Chapman (Georgia Tech) Building quantum coherences one atom at a time: Bose-Einstein condensates, and trapping single atoms and photons April 19 Ken Dill (UCSF) Dynamics and Fluctuations in Few-Particle Systems April 26 Richard Turco (Atmospheric Sciences UCLA) Stratospheric Aerosal and Climate Geoengineering May 3 Klaus Schulten (Beckham Institute/University of Illinois/Champaign) The Computational Microscope May 17 Albert Libchaber (Rockefeller University) Physical Aspects of the Origin of Life Problem May 24 James Spudich (Dept. of Biochemistry/ Stanford University) Regulation of the cell's dynamic city plan and the myosin family of molecular motors May 31 Steve Girvin (Yale) Circuit QED: What is the Electric Field of a Single Photon? June 7 Aharon Kapitulnik (Stanford) "Search for Broken Time Reversal Symmetry State in Novel Superconductors" June 14 Gary Steigman (Ohio State University)

	Winter 2007
	January 11 Carolyn Larabell(LBNL) X-ray Tomography of Biological Cells January 18 Roger Falcone (Berkeley) Time-Resolved X-Ray Scattering from Materials at High Energy Density January 25 John Mather, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center From the Big Bang to the Nobel Prize and Beyond (See photos from talk and reception) February 8 Scott Ransom, NRAO A Millisecond Pulsar (and Basic Physics) Bonanza with the GBT February 15 Moses H.W. Chan (Penn.State) Cancelled Can a solid be "superfluid"? February 22 Kim Griest (UCSD) Searching for the invisible using gravitational lensing March 1 Jan Liphardt (UC Berkeley) Plasmons, light, DNA, and nonlinear optics: what's next in nanophotonics March 8 Hideo Mabuchi (Caltech) Quantum parameter estimation with atomic spins March 15 Antonio Castro Neto (Boston University) Drawing conclusions from graphene

	Fall 2006
	October 05 Séamus Davis (Cornell) Visualizing Complex Electronic Quantum Matter October 19 Roberto Peccei Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry in the Universe and an Arrow for Time October 26 Ned Wright (UCLA) COBE: the COsmic Background Explorer November 09 Ronald W. Hellings (Montana State University) Experimental Gravitation in Space -- History and Prospects November 16 Michael Gutperle (UCLA) Recent Developments in the String/gauge Theory Correspondence November 30 Pierre Monceau (CNRS) From Charge Density Sliding to Charge Ordering

	Spring 2006
	April 6 Terry Hwa (UCSD) Statistical Mechanics of Gene Regulation April 13 Joe Orenstein (UCB and LBNL) Dynamics of Spin Holograms in Semiconductors April 20 Stanislas Leibler (Rockefeller University) Fluctuations, information, and survival: some lessons from bacteria April 27 James Bullock (UCI) Trouble for the Standard Cosmology on Galactic Scales? May 4 Michael E. Peskin (SLAC) Dark Matter in the Cosmos and in the Lab May 11 Dan Eisenstein (University of Arizona) Dark Energy and Cosmic Sound May 18 Subir Sachdev (Harvard) Detecting boson-vortex duality in experiments: how superfluids become solids in two dimensions May 25 Sergio Ferrara (CERN) The legacy of Supergravity

	Winter 2006
	January 12 Joseph Lykken (Fermilab) Is Particle Physics ready for the LHC? January 19 Lincolne Chayes (UCLA Math) Mean-Field Driven Phase Transitions of the First Type January 26 Thomas Mason (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) The Spallation Neutron Source: A Powerful New Tool for Materials Research February 2 David A. Kosower (CEA - Commissariat á l’Energie Atomique , France) A Theorist Runs for the LHC February 9 Warren Mori (UCLA) Close coupling between experiments and full-scale computer simulations: Plasma-based acceleration February 16 Kun Yang (National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Florida State University) Find Your Partner or Expel Your Competitor: Exotic Pairing States in Fermionic Superfluids with Unbalanced Pairing Species February 23 Laura Baudis (University of Florida) Direct and Indirect Dark Matter Searches March 2 John Sarrao (Los Alamos Natinoal Laboratory) What does plutonium have to do with unconventional superconductivity? March 9 Sean Carroll (University of Chicago) Dark Energy or Worse? March 16 Bob Cousins (UCLA) Experimental High-Energy Physics at the Forthcoming CERN Large Hadron Collider March 30 Walter Greiner (University of Frankfurt) On the Extension of the Periodic System into the Sector of Strange and Antimatter

	Fall 2005
	November 03 Ulrich Schollwoeck, PhD (University of Aachen, Germany) Disentangling Stongly Correlated Quantum Systems November 10 Thomas G. Mason (UCLA) Aggregation of Slippery Droplets in Attractive Nanoemulsions November 17 Steven Cowley (UCLA) Fusion and the Era of Burning Plasmas

	Spring 2005
	April 7 Neil Shaw (Menlo Scientific Acoustics) and Charlotte B. Brown (UCLA) The ancients have stolen our inventions - Vern O. Knudsen, acoustics, and more at UCLA. April 14 Harris Kagan (OSU) Compton Scattering as a Tool for Medical Imaging April 21 Margaret Murnane (U. of Colorado, Boulder) Extreme Nonlinear Optics: Attosecond Science and Applications May 5 Lance Dixon (SLAC) Twistor spinoffs for collider physics May 12 Peter Mészáros (Penn State) Gamma Ray Bursts: the UHE perspective May 19 Alessandra Lanzara (UCB) Electron-lattice interaction and competing orders in cuprate superconductors May 26 Seth Putterman (UCLA) Energy concentrating phenomena: from sonoluminescence to crystal fusion June 2 Sudip Chakravarty (UCLA) Quantum critical points

	Winter 2005
	January 6 William Dorland (U. Maryland) Recent Advances in the Theory of Magnetized Plasma Turbulence January 13 Lawrence Krauss (Case Western Reserve University) Life, the Universe, and Nothing: The Future of Life in an Ever-Expanding Universe. January 27 Joseph Rudnick (UCLA) Icosahedral symmetry in viruses: the role of physics February 3 Jonathan Feng (UCI) Dark Matters February 10 Chetan Nayak (UCLA) Topological Quantum Computation February 17 John M. Cornwall (UCLA) QCD: 30 years later February 24 R. J. Birgeneau (UCB) High Temperature Superconductivity and Magnetism: Friends or Foes? March 3 Richard Blankenbecler (SLAC) HEP to HEP: High Energy Physics techniques applied to Highly Entangled Proteins March 10 James Symons (LBNL) Nature's Recipe for Nuclear Matter

	Fall 2004
	September 30, 1-425 P&A, 4:00 pm Saxon Lecture Gerard 't Hooft (Utrecht) Black Holes and the Information Paradox October 14, 1-434 Physics and Astronomy, 3:30 pm Christopher L. Fryer (LANL) Supernova Asymmetries and Their Effects on Nucleosynthesis October 21 Sidney Drell (SLAC) The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons and their Proliferation October 28 Chandra Varma (UCR) Quantum Critical Fermions: from Nanoscale to Macroscale November 4 Mikhail Stephanov (UIC) Phase diagram of QCD November 18 Erich Sackmann Life in elastic shells December 2 Boris Shraiman (KITP) Physical Aspects of Growth Control in Development December 9 Jianwei (John) Miao (UCLA) Three-Dimensional Diffraction Microscopy and Its Applications

	Spring 2004
	April 8 Berndt Mueller (Duke) Experiencing life near the Big Bang: how hadrons are signaling the formation of deconfined quark-gluon matter at RHIC April 15 Chao Tang (NEC, Princeton) Physical design principles in molecular and cellular biology April 22 Alex Filippenko (UC Berkeley) Evidence from Type Ia Supernovae for a Decelerating, then Accelerating Universe and Dark Energy May 6 Robert Nelson (Council on Foreign Relations & Princeton U.) Nuclear Bunker Busters, Mini-nukes, and the U.S. Nuclear Stockpile May 13 Bruce Tromberg (UCI) Multi- Dimensional Optical Imaging in Thick Tissues: Contrast across spatial scales May 20 Roger Blandford (Stanford) Relativistic Outflows from Black Holes and Neutron Stars May 27 Shri Kulkarni (Caltech) Cosmic Explosions June 3 Brad Marston (Brown) Quantum Mechanics of Global Warming

	Winter 2004
	January 8 Min Ouyang (UCSB) Molecular Spintronics: Wiring Spin Coherence between Semiconductor Quantum Dots January 15 Michael Witherell (Fermilab) Discoveries Ahead in Particle Physics January 22 Ali Yazdani (U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Mapping Electron Waves in High Temperature Superconductors January 29 Marc Kamionkowski (Caltech) Weird Gravity February 5 Carlo Montemagno (UCLA) The Surprising Role of Neutrinos in the Cosmos February 19 Saxon Lecture Margaret Kivelson (UCLA) The Physics of Planetary Magnetospheres February 26 Mikhail Shaposhnikov (EPFL, Lausanne) Baryon asymmetry of the Universe: a window to physics beyond the standard model March 4 Richard Garwin (Council on Foreign Relations & IBM) U.S. Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Explosion Testing Read Garwin's article about the discovery of parity non-conservation in muon decays: popular article (PDF), scientific paper. March 11 George Fuller (UCSD) The Surprising Role of Neutrinos in the Cosmos

	Fall 2003
	October 23 Juan Maldacena (IAS) QCD, strings and black holes: the Large N limit of field theories and gravity. October 30 Bruce D. Winstein (University of Chicago) The Cosmic Microwave Background November 6 Giovanni Zocchi (UCLA) DNA and single molecule devices November 13 Sterl Phinney (Caltech) LISA and the Future of Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy

	Spring 2003
	April 3 Francis Halzen (University of Wisconsin) High Energy Neutrino Astonomy: Results from the South Pole April 10 Shmuel Nussinov (Tel Aviv) A simple, physicist's approach to complex problems May 8 Rick Trebino (Georgia Tech) The Musical Score, the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, and the Measurement of the Shortest Events Ever Created May 15 Gregory Benford (UC Irvine)

	Winter 2003
	January 30 Jim Eisenstein (Caltech) The Quantum Hall Effect Meets Bose Condensation: Long Sought Superfluid Found? February 6 Ned Wright (UCLA) MAPping the Universe February 13 David Weitz (Harvard) Spheres on Spheres: Self Assembly and Structure of Colloidal Particles on Spherical Surfaces February 20 Saxon Lecture John Bahcall (IAS) Solar neutrinos: an overview February 27 Russ Donnelly (University of Oregon) Quantum Turbulence March 6 Rocky Kolb (Fermilab and U. Chicago) The 'Alarming' Phenomenon of Particle Creation in the Expanding Universe March 13 Eric Mazur (Harvard) Understanding or memorization: are we teaching the right thing?