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The Fermilab colloquium introduces a wide range of scientific and science-related topics presented by notable speakers from across the country and around the world.
The colloquium is open to the public. Talks are held at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoons in One West in Wilson Hall (WH1W). To enter the site you will need a REAL ID-compliant identification.
Upcoming colloquia
An integral part of Fermilab’s academic culture, “orange” colloquium talks are aimed at a broad scientific and technical audience, while “green” talks are of general interest to everyone.
Appropriate for physicists Appropriate for all attendees
Jan. 22, 2025, 3:30 pm US/Central
The proximity of our Galaxy's center presents a unique opportunity to study a galactic nucleus with orders of magnitude higher spatial resolution than can be brought to bear on any other galaxy. After more than a decade of diffraction-limited imaging on large ground-based telescopes, the case for a supermassive black hole at the Galactic center has gone from a possibility to a certainty, thanks to measurements of individual stellar orbits. The rapidity with which these stars move on small-scale orbits indicates a source of tremendous gravity and provides the best evidence that supermassive black holes, which confront and challenge our knowledge of fundamental physics, do exist in the Universe. This work was made possible through the use of speckle imaging techniques, which correct for the blurring effects of the earth's atmosphere in post-processing and allow the first diffraction-limited images to be produced with these large ground-based telescopes.
Further progress in high-angular resolution imaging techniques on large, ground-based telescopes has resulted in the more sophisticated technology of adaptive optics, which corrects for these effects in real time. This has increased the power of imaging by an order of magnitude and permitted spectroscopic study at high resolution on these telescopes for the first time. With adaptive optics, high-resolution studies of the Galactic Center have shown that what happens near a supermassive black hole is quite different than what theoretical models have predicted, which changes many of our notions of how galaxies form and evolve over time. By continuing to push on the cutting-edge of high-resolution technology, we have been able to capture the orbital motions of stars with sufficient precision to test Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity in a regime that has never been probed before.
Feb. 5, 2025, 3:30 pm US/Central
After the successful data taking at the LHC over the past decade, the profile of the Higgs boson has been well established. However, since the Higgs field is linked to deep structural questions of the Standard Model such as flavor, naturalness and the stability of the vacuum, it calls for further exploration. There is consensus in the particle physics community that a Higgs factory should be build to explore the properties of the Higgs boson with high precision.
After the 2020 update of the Strategy for Particle Physics in Europe, a feasibility study for the realization of the Future Circular Collider (FCC) at CERN was launched. The outcome of the study is expected to become available in 2025. Together with developments on the international landscape of the field it will provide important input to the new update of the European Strategy, which is currently ongoing. This update has the ambition to develop the preferred option for the realization of the next flagship project at CERN and to discuss alternatives.
In this colloquium, our present understanding of the properties of the Higgs boson as well as prospects at future colliders are summarized. In addition, the present status of the FCC feasibility study as well as the European Strategy process are discussed.
Feb. 6, 2025, 9:15 am US/Central
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton recognizes the transformational impact artificial neural networks, and machine learning more broadly, are having on science, technology, and society, and honors the foundational contributions of these Laureates to the development of artificial neural networks. After a brief overview of their seminal contributions, I discuss the applications of these methods in high energy physics, particularly in the discoveries and studies of the top quark and the Higgs boson, and comment on recent trends and future plans.