Department Colloquia
Past colloquia
Martin Weiner Lecture Series
Department of Physics Colloquium
4:00pm, Abelson 131
Refreshments at 3:30pm outside Abelson 131
Fall 2009 Colloquia
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
The Make-Believe World of Real-World Physics
Eric Mazur, Harvard University
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Intrinsic Alignments of Galaxies: Effects of Large-Scale Structure on Galaxy Formation
Tereasa Brainerd, Boston University
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
How the Hippies Saved Physics
David Kaiser, MIT
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Watching Worlds Collide
Matthew Kleban, NYU
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
No colloquium.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
The Quantum and Fluid Mechanics of Global Warming
Brad Marston, Brown University
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Precision Cosmology with 21 cm Tomography
Max Tegmark, MIT
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Models and manipulations: Min oscillations inside an E.coli bacterium
Andrew Rutenberg, Dalhousie University
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Ionic Membranes and Gels
Monica Olvera de la Cruz, Northwestern University
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The Shape Dependence of Fluctuation-Induced Forces
Mehran Kardar, MIT
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
The Remarkable Power of General Relativity
Gary Horowitz, UC Santa Barbara
Spring 2010 Colloquia
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Friction: A Surprisingly Slippery Subject
Mark O. Robbins, Johns Hopkins University
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Grabbing water with thin elastic sheets: The elasto-pipette
Pedro Miguel Reis, MIT
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Nanoparticle templated assembly of virus protein cages: principles and applications
Bogdan Dragnea, Indiana University
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Novel Colloidal and Interfacial Phenomena in Liquid Crystalline Systems
Nicholas Abbott, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Abstract: Processes leading to the self-organization of molecules and colloids within and at the interfaces of isotropic liquids have been widely studied in the past. This talk will focus beyond those past studies by addressing interfacial and colloidal phenomena in systems in which the isotropic solvent is replaced by a nematic liquid crystal (LC). Observations derived from two experimental systems will be described. The first system involves LC-in-water emulsion droplets, and the influence of droplet size and interfacial chemistry on the structure of the droplets. Recent experimental observations in our laboratory have unmasked size-dependent ordering of the LC droplets that is not predicted by classical theories of LCs. Ordering transitions that are exquisitely sensitive to certain classes of biological lipids (e.g., endotoxin) have also been discovered.
The second experimental system to be discussed involves the interfacial organization of solid microparticles at aqueous-LC interfaces. Our observations have revealed that the nematic order of a LC can give rise to new classes of inter-particle interactions at these interfaces. Significantly, the symmetries of the interactions differ from those encountered in isotropic solvent systems, thus giving rise to interfacial organizations of particles not previously reported. This presentation will highlight fundamental and unresolved issues related to the behaviors of these LC-colloidal systems.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Stochastic conformal geometry: applications in physics
Ilya Gruzberg, University of Chicago
Abstract: Stochastic conformal geometry aims at a precise geometric and probabilistic characterization of complicated, often fractal, random shapes that appear in many physical phenomena. Examples include clusters and their boundaries in statistical mechanics, growth patterns like diffusion-limited aggregation and electrodeposition, driven non-equilibrium systems, turbulence, random surfaces in 2D quantum gravity, etc. In two dimensions shapes (steady, growing or fluctuating) can be specified by conformal maps and their evolution. Additional requirement of conformal invariance (made precise in the stochastic geometric setting) has recently lead to powerful methods: Schramm-Loewner evolutions and conformal restriction, that allow to classify and quantify many aspects of random shapes in 2D. I will explain basic ideas of these methods and illustrate them with numerous physical applications.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Physical Aspects of Viral Infectivity
William Gelbart, UCLA
Abstract: In this talk I introduce the two most prevalent kinds of viruses - those with single-stranded (ss) RNA genomes and those with double-stranded (ds) DNA genomes. I discuss their different "life cycles" in terms of the physical differences between ssRNA and dsDNA and of their co-evolution with bacterial, plant, and animal hosts. Three basic physical phenomena are argued to lie at the heart of the infectivity of these viruses, and are investigated by a combination of theory and experiment:
(1) high pressure in their capsids due to strong confinement of dsDNA genomes, illustrated by particular bacterial (e.g., lambda) and animal (Herpes) viruses;
(2) self-assembly of ssRNA genomes and capsid proteins into infectious virions in the case of plant (bromo) viruses; and
(3) "budding" of nucleocapsids, i.e., their spontaneous wrapping by lipid bilayer membrane as part of the exit of infectious virions from host cells, illustrated by a particular mammalian (Sindbis) virusTuesday, March 9, 2010
Structure of trajectory space, broken symmetry and a glass transition
David Chandler, University of California Berkeley
Abstract: Super-cooling a liquid often produces glass -- a solid with no apparent structural order. Unlike crystallization, a glass transition is not accompanied by a thermodynamic singularity. Nevertheless, a phase transition can underlie the formation of glass. Unlike equilibrium order-disorder phenomena, this transition appears as a singularity in a partition function of dynamical histories. I describe this transition -- its order parameters and phase diagrams.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Frans Pretorius, Princeton University
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Eisenbud Lecture Series in Mathematics and Physics
Tuesday April 13, Wednesday April 14 and Thursday April 15
Daniel Freed, University of Texas at Austin
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Randall Kamien, University of Pennsylvania
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Alex Maloney, McGill University