Condensed and Living Matter Seminars

Upcoming Condensed and Living Matter Seminars



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Critical points and Bifurcations integrate and amplify sensory information.

Ben Machta (Yale University)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, A8

Biological systems must integrate and amplify signals which are faint and insignificant at the level of individual sensory receptors. In this talk I will argue that organisms can use the diverging…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Topology, Spin and Orbital in DNA-type Chiral Quantum Materials

Binghai Yan (Weizmann Institute of Science)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, A8

In chemistry and biochemistry, chirality represents the structural asymmetry characterized by non-superimposable mirror images for a material like DNA. In physics, however, chirality commonly refers…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Hybrid superconducting photonic circuits and quantum frequency conversion

Hong Tang (Yale University)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, A8

Microwave-to-optical converters represent an indispensable component for quantum networks. Integrating photonics with superconductors is challenging because optical excitations…

Past Condensed and Living Matter Seminars



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Optical neural networks for faster AI and super resolution imaging

Alex Lvovsky (University of Oxford)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, A8

Although machine intelligence is taking over the world, its current digital electronic platform is very inefficient in terms of energy consumption. Switching to analogue computation, which function more like human…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Learning the shape of the immune and protein universe

Armita Nourmohammad (University of Washington)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, A8

The adaptive immune system consists of highly diverse B- and T-cell receptors, which can recognize a multitude of diverse pathogens. Immune recognition relies on molecular interactions between…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Randomness, Complexity, and the Biological Frontier

Pankaj Mehta (University of Boston)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, A8

The towering successes of twentieth century theoretical physics were marked by two guiding principles: symmetry and energy functionals (reflecting equilibrium dynamics). Yet how we…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Non-reciprocal pattern formation

M. Cristina Marchetti (UC Santa Barbara)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, A8

Spatio-temporal patterns in nonlinear oscillatory and excitable media have been studied extensively in systems lacking conserved quantities. More recently, pattern formation of conserved fields has…



Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: Orientational Order in Biological Development - Superfluid Shrimp

Mark Bowick (Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, UC Santa Barbara)
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, A8

Morphogenesis, the process through which genes generate form, establishes tissue scale order as a template for constructing the complex shapes of the body plan. The extensive growth required to build…