Eli Burstein Lecture: "Confinement & Tunneling, Pillars of Nanoscience"
Emilio Mendez: Director of Energy Science and Technology, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Professor of Physics, Stony Brook University
The properties of materials are in general determined by chemical composition and structure, but at the nanoscale they depend on size as well. As one or more dimensions of a material become increasingly smaller,…
Math-Bio seminar: "Phenotypic plasticity promotes balanced polymorphism and recombination modification in periodic environments"
Davorka Gulisija, University of Pennsylvania
Phenotypic plasticity is known to arise in varying habitats where it diminishes harmful environmental effects. How plasticity shapes genetic architecture of traits under varying selection is unknown. Using an…
Special Condensed Matter Seminar: "Nano-electrodynamics with graphene plasmons"
Mark Lundeberg, Institute of Photonic Sciences (Castelldefels, Spain).
I will review my recent work on plasmons in graphene, a naturally appropriate material for studying electron motion at terahertz and mid-infrared frequencies. Graphene plasmons are extremely confined propagating…
Department Colloquium: "Results from the New Horizons Flyby of Pluto"
Marc Buie (Southwest Research Institute) hosted by Mariangela Bernardi
July 2015 saw the culmination of decades of work to get a detailed look at a distant and intriguing world. As of late 2016, the transmission of all data from the encounter was completed and the project is now…
Math-Bio seminar: "A flexible inference of complex population histories and recombination from multiple genomes"
Champak Reddy, CUNY Graduate Center
Analyzing whole genome sequences provides an unprecedented resolution of the historical demography of populations. In the process, most inferential methods either ignore or simplify the confounding effects of…
Special Condensed Matter Seminar: "Manipulating Charge Carriers for Quantum Transport in Van der Waals Materials Nanostructures"
Ke Wang, Harvard University
Since the discovery of graphene via mechanical exfoliation, it has been shown that the electronic properties of solids can undergo dramatic change when the material thickness is reduced to the atomic limit. Recently…
Special Condensed Matter Seminar: "A Berry Phase Switch in Circular Graphene Resonators"
Fereshte Ghahari Kermani, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Berry phase is an example of anholonomy, where the phase of a quantum state may not return to its original value after its parameters cycle around a closed path; instead the quantum system’s wave function may acquire…
Astro Seminar: "Massive Neutrinos and Large-scale Structure: Forecasts for SKA"
Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro (Simons CCA)
In the first part of the seminar I will discuss some of the effects that massive neutrinos induce on the large-scale structure of the Universe, from their impact on the clustering of halos, galaxies and voids to…
Math-Bio seminar: "Covariate-corrected biclustering methods for gene-expression and GWAS data"
Adi Rangan, New York University
A common goal in data-analysis is to sift through a large matrix and detect any significant submatrices (i.e., biclusters) that have a low numerical rank. To give an example from genomics, one might imagine a data…
Special Condensed Matter Seminar: "Shining light on topological insulators and Weyl semimetals"
Liang Wu, University of California, Berkeley
The last decade has witnessed an explosion of research investigating the role of topology in band-structure, as exemplified by the wealth of recent works on topological insulators (TIs) and Weyl semimetals (WSMs). In…