University of Chicago Physics Department

Colloquia, 1999-2000 through ...

Aut 99 * Win 00 * Spr 00

Aut 00 * Win 01 * Spr 01

Aut 01 * Win 02 * Spr 02

Aut 02 * Win 03 * Spr 03

* Aut 03 * Win 04 * Spr 04

* Aut 04 * Win 05 * Spr 05

* Aut 05

Archive 1 - Aut 93-Spr 99


Date Speaker Title

Autumn 1999 - Peter G.O. Freund, Chairman
Sept. 30 Juan Maldacena
Harvard University
The Large N Limit of Gauge Theories
Oct. 7 Martin Gutzwiller
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Can You See Classical Chaos in Quantum Mechanics?
Oct. 14 Edward Blucher
University of Chicago
Investigating the Difference Between Matter and Antimatter
Oct. 21 Christopher Lobb
Univ. of Maryland, College Park
Josephson-Junction Arrays as Coherent Sources:
A Superconducting Laser?
Oct. 28 Lincoln Wolfenstein
Carnegie Mellon University
1999 Zachariasen Lecture
Fermi's Little Neutron, the Neutrino, 65 Years Later
Nov. 4 Neal Koblitz
University of Washington
From Fermat's Last Theorem to Cryptography
Nov. 11 Joshua Frieman
Fermi Nat'l Accelerator Laboratory
Early Science Results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Nov. 18 Corbin Covault
University of Chicago
Tracking the Elusive Blazar
Nov. 25 Thanksgiving no colloquium today
Dec. 2 Savas Dimopoulos
Stanford University
Sub-millimeter Size Dimensions and Quantum Gravity at a TeV

Winter 2000 - Henry Frisch, Chairman
Jan. 6 Lourdes Monteagudo
Teachers Academy for
Mathematics & Science
The Challenges of Teaching Math and Science
in an Urban Environment
Jan. 13 Robert B. Griffiths
Carnegie-Mellon University
Quantum Mechanics and Measurements
Jan. 20 Michael Witherell
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Fermilab and the Future of High Energy Physics
Jan. 27 Harvey Tananbaum
Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory
First Scientific Results from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory
joint Physics/Astronomy & Astrophysics colloquium
Feb. 3 Joseph Lykken
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
The Search for Extra Dimensions
Feb. 10 Stuart Freedman
University of California/Berkeley
Solving the Solar Neutrino Puzzle in the Laboratory:
Experiments with KamLAND
Feb. 17 Matthew Choptuik
University of British Columbia
Critical Phenomena in Gravitational Collapse
Feb. 24 Steven Vogel
Duke University
Feather Shafts and Daffodil Stems:
Twisting in the Wind without Getting Bent out of Shape
Mar. 2 John Simpson
University of Chicago
The Cosmic Radiation: Past, Present, and Future
Mar. 9 Maurice Goldhaber
Brookhaven National Laboratory
A Student at the Cavendish Laboratory in the 1930s

Spring 2000 - Thomas A. Witten, Chairman
Mar. 30 Jacob Klein
Weizmann Institute
Entropic Forces: From Colloids to Biolubrication
Apr. 6 Sunil Sinha
Argonne National Laboratory APS
Watching Competing Fluctuations in Novel Magnetic Systems
Apr. 13 Sidney Nagel
University of Chicago
Breaking Away, Selective Withdrawal and Islets in the Stream:
Encapsulation with Threads of Fluid
Apr. 20 Robert Rosner
University of Chicago
Turbulent Mixing in Astrophysical Flashes
Apr. 27 Andrew Lange
California Institute of Technology
Imaging the Early Universe:
Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background
May 4 Aris Floratos
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Combinatorial Pattern Discovery in Biological Data
May 18 Wolfgang Ketterle
Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
Bose-Einstein Condensation:
Quantum Mechanics at Zero Temperature
May 25 Raymond Pierrehumbert
University of Chicago
The Physics of Global Warming
June 1 Kurt Gottfried
Cornell University;
Union of Concerned Scientists
US Nuclear Weapons Policy: Is the Cold War Over?

Autumn 2000 - Robert M. Wald, Chairman
Sept. 28 James Buckley
Washington University
TeV Gamma-Ray Astronomy:
The Most Violent Places in the Universe
Oct. 5 Woowon Kang
University of Chicago
Quantum Hall Ferromagnetism
in a Two-Dimensional Electron System
Oct. 12 Savdeep Sethi
University of Chicago
Strings and Related Things
Oct. 19 Roger Penrose
Oxford University
The Problem of Space-Time Singularities
Oct. 26 Albrecht Wagner
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron
(DESY)
TESLA:
e+e- Collider and X-ray Free Electron Laser
Scientific Potential and Technological Challenge
Nov. 3 John Bahcall
IAS/Princeton University
Solar Neutrinos: Where we are, Where we are going
joint Physics/Astronomy colloquium
Nov. 9 Lisa Randall
Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
New Dimensions to Einstein's Gravity
Nov. 16 Alvin Weinberg
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Zachariasen Lecture
Does Nuclear Energy Have a Future?
Nov. 23 Thanksgiving no colloquium today
Nov. 30 Nigel Goldenfeld
University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign
My Manhattan Project:
A Physicist's Adventures on Wall Street

Winter 2001 - Susan N. Coppersmith, Chairman
Jan. 4 Paul Chaikin
Princeton University
Trillions of Quantum Dots, Fingerprints,
Nanolithography with Diblock Copolymers,
and the Formation of Striped Patterns
Jan. 11 Steven M. Kahn
Columbia University
First Results from the Reflection Grating Spectrometer
on the XMM-Newton Observatory
Jan. 18 Suzanne Staggs
Princeton University
A Limit on the Polarized Anisotropy
of the Cosmic Microwave Background
at Subdegree Angular Scales
Jan. 25 Janet Conrad
Columbia University
The Front Page Nu's
Feb. 1 Theodore Postol
Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
Scientific Fraud in the National Missile Defense Program
Feb. 8 Mark Oreglia
University of Chicago
Have We Caught a Glimpse of the Higgs Boson?
(Comments by a Cautious Participant)
Feb. 15 Sean Carroll
University of Chicago
What do we (really) know about the expansion of the universe?
Feb. 22 David DiVincenzo
IBM T. J. Watson
Research Center
Alternatives for Solid State Quantum Computing
Mar. 1 W. E. Moerner
Stanford University
Single-Molecule Spectroscopy,
from Quantum Optics to Molecular Motors
Mar. 8 Richard Gaitskell
University College London
Whither WIMPs:
A Review of CDMS, and Other Experiments,
Looking for 30% of the Missing Mass of the Universe

Spring 2001 - Bruce Winstein, Chairman
Mar. 29 Martin Klein
Yale University
100 Years Post Planck
Apr. 5 Donald G. York
University of Chicago
Continuing Results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey:
The Farthest, the Coolest, and the Darkest
Apr. 12 Gerald Gabrielse
Harvard University
First Positron Cooling of Antiprotons:
Getting Closer to Cold Antihydrogen
Apr. 19 Laura H. Greene
University of Illinois/
Urbana-Champaign
Detecting Broken Symmetries
in High-Temperature Superconductors
Apr. 26 William Cochran
University of Texas
at Austin
Making Sense of Extra-Solar Planets
May 3 Steven Chu
Stanford University
What can Biology do for Physics?
May 10 Young-Kee Kim
University of California/
Berkeley
Massive Thoughts
May 17 James W. Cronin
University of Chicago
Some Vignettes from the History of Cosmic Rays
May 24 Patricia R. Burchat
Stanford University
Recent Results on CP Violation in B Decays from BABAR
May 31 Marc Kamionkowski
California Institute
of Technology
The First 10-38 Seconds

Autumn 2001 - Jonathan Rosner, Chairman
Oct. 4 Nergis Mavalvala
California Institute of Technology
Gravitational Wave Detection with Interferometers:
Present to Future
Oct. 11 David G. Grier
University of Chicago
The Guiding Light:
Kinetics, Dynamics and Controlled Motion
in Holographic Optical Tweezer Arrays
Oct. 18 Michael E. Peskin
Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center
A Decade of Precision Electroweak Measurements
Oct. 25 Yoichiro Nambu
University of Chicago
The Formative Years of Particle Physics
2001 Zachariasen Lecture
Nov. 1 Jack Cowan
University of Chicago
Towards a Mathematically Tractable Model
of the Action of the Visual Cortex
Nov. 8 Gregory R. Snow
Univ. of Nebraska/Lincoln
The Cosmic Ray Observatory Project:
A Statewide Outreach and Education Experiment in Nebraska
Nov. 15 Leon Balents
Univ. of Calif./Santa Barbara
Splitting the Electron
Nov. 22 Thanksgiving No colloquium today
Friday
Nov. 30
R.G. Hamish Robertson
University of Washington
SNO Flies: The Solar Neutrino Problem Resolved

Winter 2002 - Jonathan Rosner, Chairman
Jan. 10 Anthony J. Leggett
University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign
Introduction to High-energy Low-temperature Physics
Jan. 17 John Marko
University of Illinois
at Chicago
Direct Micromechanical Study of Single Biomolecules:
Molecular Biology Meets Soft Condensed Matter Physics
Jan. 24 Michael Turner
University of Chicago
Making Sense of the New Cosmology
Jan. 31 Philip W. Phillips
University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign
A Glassy Cooper Pair Metal
Feb. 7 Young-Kee Kim
University of California at Berkeley
Massive Thoughts
Feb. 14 Andrew Cohen
Boston University
Deconstructing Dimensions
Feb. 21 Jayanth R. Banavar
Pennsylvania State Univ.
Geometry and Physics of Proteins
Feb. 28 David Kestenbaum
National Public Radio
My Father Sees Muons in the Driveway
or How to Explain Physics to Everybody Else
Mar. 7 Philippe Cluzel
University of Chicago
The Physics of Molecular Evolvable Machines

Spring 2002 - Jonathan Rosner, Chairman
Mar. 28 Eric J. Heller
Harvard
Making Waves: Quantum Billiards to Concert Halls
Apr.4 John Beacom
Fermilab
Supernova Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics
Apr. 11 Norval Fortson
University of Washington
T-violation and a new search for a permanent electric dipole moment of the Hg atom
Apr. 18 Nat Fisch
Princeton University
Uses of High Power Electromagnetic Waves in Plasma
Apr. 25 Eric Adelberger
University of Washington
Sub-millimeter Tests of the Gravitational Inverse Square Law
May 2 Janna Levin
DAMTP, Cambridge
Chaos, black holes and gravitational waves
May 9 Maria Spiropulu
University of Chicago
There is something about SUSY
May 16 Thomas F. Rosenbaum
University of Chicago
Tunable Tunneling in Spin Solids, Liquids and Glasses
May 23 Donald Marolf
Syracuse University
A new look for black hole physics
May 30 Peter Freund
University of Chicago
Geometry in Physics



Autumn 2002 - Woowon Kang, Chairman
Oct. 3 John Carlstrom
University of Chicago
Detection of Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization with DASI
Oct. 10 Ali Yazdani
UIUC
Fine-Tuning Electronic States in Carbon Nanotubes
Oct. 17 Juan Collar
University of Chicago
Direct searches for new astroparticles: Heavy and light artillery at EFI
Oct. 24 Daniel Tsui
Princeton University
Zachariasen Lecture: More is indeed different: an example of novel physics from semiconductor electronics
Oct. 31 Alan Watson
University of Leeds, CFCS
The Highest Energy Particles in Nature
Nov. 7 Don Lamb
University of Chicago
New Results from HETE-2: Gamma-Ray Bursts as a Probe of Cosmology
Nov. 14 Horst Stormer
Columbia University/Lucent Technologies
Fractional Charges and other Tales from Flatland
Nov. 21 Ilya Gruzberg
University of Chicago
Random thoughts: physics of disorder
Nov. 28
No colloquium today - Happy Thanksgiving
Dec. 5 Robert Austin
Princeton University
Why Biology is Hard for Physicists

Winter 2003 - Woowon Kang, Savdeep Sethi, Roland Winston, Chairmen
Jan. 9 Chris Quigg
Fermi National Laboratory
The Future of Particle Physics
Jan. 16 Valery Nesvizhevsky
Inst. Laue-Langevin, Grenoble
Quantum states of neutrons in the Earth's
gravitational field and interaction of neutrons
with nanoparticles
Jan. 23 Herman Verlinde
Princeton University
Holography and Gravitational Collapse
Jan. 30 Leonid Glazman
University of Minnesota
Kondo Effect in Quantum Dots
Feb. 6 Steve Simon
Lucent Technologies
The Unexpected Physics in Modern Wireless Communication: Replicas, Diffusons, and Supersymmetry for fun and profit
Feb. 13 Harry L. Swinney
University of Texas at Austin
Patterns and shock waves in rapid granular flows
Feb. 20 Carlos E.M. Wagner
Argonne National Laboratory
Supersymmetry, the Baryon Asymmetry and the Origin of Mass
Feb. 27 Zheng-Tian Lu
Argonne National Laboratory
Catching Rare Atoms with Light
Mar. 6 Hitoshi Murayama
Univ. of California, Berkeley
The Next Twenty Years in Particle Physics
Mar. 13 William Bialek
Princeton University
Entropy, Information and the Brain


Spring 2003 - Woowon Kang, Savdeep Sethi, Roland Winston, Chairmen
Apr. 3 Matthew Fisher
UC Santa Barbara
Cuprates Amiss: Subtle simplicity or a matted mess?
Apr. 10 Arnold Levine
IAS/Rockefeller
The Human Genome Project
Apr. 17 Aron Pinczuk
Columbia University
Illuminating Electron Liquids in Quantum Structures
Apr. 24 David Weinberger
Senior Advisor,
UBS Warburg
A Look at Mathematical Trading in Financial Markets
May 1 Raymond Chiao
UC Berkeley
Photon tunneling times and superluminality
May 8 Roger Hildebrand
University of Chicago
The Infrared Cirrus
May 15 William A. Zajc
Columbia University
The Science of RHIC
May 22 Raman Sundrum
Johns Hopkins University
The SuperWorld, the BraneWorld, and Our World
May 29 Frank Wilczek
MIT
The Origin of Mass and the Feebleness of Gravity


Autumn 2003 - Ed Blucher, Dietrich Müller, Tom Witten, Chairmen
Oct. 2 Eric Isaacs
Bell Laboratories
Lucent Technologies
X-ray Nano-Vision of Solids
Oct. 9 Savdeep Sethi
University of Chicago
Time and String Theory
Oct. 16 Eugene Parker
University of Chicago
Spontaneous Discontinuities in Magnetic Fields
Oct. 23 Brad Marston
Brown University
The Quantum Mechanics of Global Warming
Oct. 30 Mark Newman
University of Michigan
Epidemics, Erdos numbers, and the Internet: The structure and function of networks
Nov. 6 Francis Halzen
Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison
High Energy Neutrino Astronomy: Results from the South Pole
Nov. 13 Hermann Grunder
Argonne National Laboratory
What Can and Should Nuclear Energy Contribute to the Energy Mix
Nov. 20 Uzi Landman
Georgia Institute of Technology
SMALL IS DIFFERENT
Emergent phenomena in the nonscalable regime
Dec. 4 Eric Siggia
Rockefeller University
The genome as parts list and assembly manual

Winter 2004 - Ed Blucher, Dietrich Müller, Tom Witten, Chairmen
Jan. 15 Jim Eisenstein
Caltech
Quantum Hall Effect Meets Bose Condensation: Long Sought Superfluid Found?
Jan. 22 Robert Kirshner
Harvard University
The ESSENCE of the Universe: what is the dark energy?
Jan. 29 Stephen I. Schwartz
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Nuclear Weapons: Not Just for Deterrence Anymore?
Feb. 5 Randy Hulet
Rice University
Conversion of an Atomic Fermi Gas to a Molecular Bose Gas
Feb. 12 Sajeev John
University of Toronto
Photonic Band Gap Materials: Semiconductors of Light
Feb. 19 David DeMille
Yale University
Fundamental physics with diatomic molecules: from CP violation to quantum computation
Feb. 26 James Cronin
University of Chicago
Zachariasen Lecture "Fermi Remembered"
Mar. 4 Wayne Hu
University of Chicago
The Physics of CMB Polarization

Spring 2004 - Ed Blucher, Dietrich Müller, Tom Witten, Chairmen
Apr. 1 Thomas A. Prince
Caltech
Astronomy and Physics with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA)
Apr. 8 Michael Turner
University of Chicago, NSF
A Cosmologist Goes to Washington: Report from the Front Lines
Apr. 15 Roger Angel
University of Arizona
Seeing and analyzing extra-solar planets: a new challenge for astronomical telescopes
Apr. 22 Ian Shipsey
Purdue University
Bringing Hearing to the Deaf - Cochlear Implants: a Technical and Personal Account
Apr. 29 Thomas Humphrey
Exploratorium
Artists and Scientists at the Exploratorium
May 6 Alexei Abrikosov
Bell Laboratories
Argonne Nat. Lab.
Superconductivity:history and modern state
May 13 Jerry Gollub
Haverford College
Nonlinear Dynamics of Fluid Motion: Mixing and Clustering
May 20 Peter Galison
Harvard University
Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps
May 27
No colloquium today
June 3 Guy Savard
Univ. of Chicago
Argonne National Lab.
Physics and technology of the Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) Facility
June 10 Trevor Weekes
Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics
Astronomy at the Extreme

Autumn 2004 - Yau Wah, Paul Wiegmann, and Sean Carroll, Chairman
Date Speaker
Institution
Title
Oct. 7 Juan Collar
University of Chicago
COUPP, the Chicago Observatory for Underground Particle Physics (and other groping in the dark)
Oct. 14 Igor Novikov
Nordita
Problems of the Internal Structure of Black Holes
Oct. 21 Gabrielle Lyon
Project Exploration
Unearthing the Hidden Curriculum
Oct. 28 Seth Grae
Thorium Power
A forward-looking perspective on nuclear non-proliferation policy and how it will affect basic and applied science
Nov. 4 Savas Dimopoulos
Stanford
Particle Physics circa 2010
Nov. 11 Norman Birge
Michigan State University
Electron Dephasing and Energy Exchange in Mesoscopic Metal Wires
Nov. 18 Deborah Jin
University of Colorado
Using a Fermi gas to create Bose-Einstein condensates
Nov. 25 - - -
No colloquium today, Thanksgiving holiday
Dec. 2 Jonathan Feng
University of Calif.,
Irvine
Dark Matters
Dec. 9 Andrei Varlamov
University of Rome
Physics in the Kitchen

Winter 2005 - Yau Wah, Paul Wiegmann, and Sean Carroll, Chairman
Date Speaker
Institution
Title
Jan. 6 Scott Hughes
MIT
Gravitational waves: A tool for studying black hole physics
Jan. 13 Eugene Beier
University of Pennsylvania
The Revolution in Neutrino Physics
Jan. 20 Samir Mathur
Ohio State
What is inside a black hole?
Jan. 27 Charles Marcus
Harvard
Quantum Circuits
Feb. 3 Ed Blucher
University of Chicago
Searching for Clues to the Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry with Kaons and Neutrinos
Feb. 10 Robert Geroch
University of Chicago
Faster than light?
Feb. 17 George Crabtree
Argonne
The Hydrogen Economy: Challenges and Opportunities
Feb. 24 Tanmay Vachaspati
Case Western Reserve University
Cosmic problems for condensed matter experiment
Mar. 3 Cheng Chin
University of Chicago
Convert a Bose-Einstein condensate into a Cooper-paired degenerate Fermi gas
Mar. 10 Gordon Cates
University of Virginia
Polarized He-3 and Xe-129 for medicine, biophysics, and the structure of the nucleon

Spring 2005 - Yau Wah, Paul Wiegmann, and Sean Carroll, Chairman
Date Speaker
Institution
Title
Mar. 31 Sean Carroll
University of Chicago
Why is the Universe Accelerating?
Apr. 7
Colloquium cancelled
Apr. 14 Neal Lane
Rice University
One perspective on American science - some trouble ahead!
Apr. 21 Robert Deck
University of Toledo
The Connection between Spin and Statistics in Quantum Mechanics
Apr. 28 Melanie Mitchell
Portland State University
The Effects of Spatial Distribution in Coevolutionary Learning
May 5 Peter Sarnak
Princeton
Zeta functions and random matrix theory
May 12 Kathy Levin
University of Chicago
The New Fermi Superfluids: From High Temperature Superconductors To Ultracold Atomic Gases
May 19 Arthur Miller
University College London
Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes
May 26 Ron Walsworth
Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics
Multidisciplinary Applications of State-Selected Atoms
June 2 Neal Weiner
New York University
Neutrino Mass and Dark Energy
June 9 Carlos Bustamante
Univ. of California,
Berkeley
Single Molecule Observation of Hepatitis C Virus RNA Helicase at Work

Autumn 2005 - Cheng Chin, Ilya Gruzberg, Carlos Wagner, and Bruce Winstein, Chairman
Date Speaker
Institution
Title
Sept. 29 Sidney Redner
Boston University
Statistical Physics of Citations
Oct. 6 Ilya Gruzberg
University of Chicago
Multifractals in condensed matter and field theory: new approaches and results
Oct. 13 Paolo Privitera
University of Rome
Exploring the cosmic rays energy frontier with the Auger Observatory
Oct. 20 Mark Wise
Caltech
Naturalness and the Laws of Nature
Oct. 27 Ramamurti Shankar
Yale University
Dots for dummies
Nov. 3 Lawrence Krauss
Case Western
Life, the Universe, and Nothing: The Future of Life in an Ever Expanding Universe..
Nov. 10 Douglas Stone
Yale University
Einstein's unknown insight and the problem of quantizing chaotic motion
Nov. 17 Vladan Vuletic
MIT
Single photons stored in many entangled atoms
Nov. 24

THANKSGIVING - No Colloquium
Dec. 1 Paul Langacker
Univ. of Pennsylvania/Fermilab
The Standard Theory and Beyond

Winter 2006 - Cheng Chin, Ilya Gruzberg, Carlos Wagner, and Bruce Winstein, Chairman
Date Speaker
Institution
Title
Jan. 5 George Gollin
UIUC
Hijacking Liberia and Other Acts of Piracy: Diploma Mills in a Networked World
Jan. 12 Daniel Fisher
Harvard Univ.
Is evolution understood? Quantitative questions from a statistical mechanic
Jan. 19 Frank Wilczek
MIT
Zachariasen Lecture "The Universe is a Strange Place"
Jan. 26 Woowon Kang
Univ. of Chicago
Tunneling Spectroscopy of an Electron Superhighway
Feb. 2 Peter Garnavich
Univ. of Notre Dame
Measuring Dark Energy with Supernovae
Feb. 9 Chetan Nayak
UCSB
Topological Quantum Computation
Feb. 16 Jun Ye
JILA, NIST,
Univ. of Colorado
Uniting precision measurement and quantum control
Feb. 23 Benoit Mandelbrot
IBM, Yale
The Smooth and the Rough: The Fractal Geometry of Roughness
Mar. 2 Gordon Baym
UIUC
The Uncertainty Principals: Bohr and Heisenberg from Copenhagen to Copenhagen
Mar. 8 Dava Sobel
Robert Vare Writer-in-Residence
in the College
Galileo: Working Scientist
[NOTE: Special Day - Wednesday, Mar. 8]

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Archive 1 - Aut 93-Spr 99


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