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.
Unless otherwise advertised, talks are held at 4 p.m. on Wednesday afternoons in One West in Wilson Hall (WH1W).
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
March 29, 2023, 4:00 pm US/Central
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have been fundamental in establishing the cosmological standard model, ΛCDM, which describes the evolution of the universe from the earliest moments to the present day. Upcoming measurements with increasingly powerful cameras are now poised to search for physics beyond the standard model, including new particles that could leave... More »
April 12, 2023, 4:00 pm US/Central
The Manhattan Project was spurred by the fear that Germany was building their own nuclear weapons and Allied anxiety continuously pondered the Nazi atomic progress. General Groves commissioned the military and scientific intelligence mission code-named Alsos, which uncovered that indeed the Germans had a two-year lead on the American nuclear program. In April 1945, in... More »
April 26, 2023, 4:00 pm US/Central
In this talk I will attempt to outline where I think computational science is going over the next twenty years and how the emergence of new platforms that complement and challenge traditional HPC may impact the types of problems the community works on, the platforms that centers design and deploy and the research that gets funded. As we launch into the post-exascale epoch we face a computing landscape that is quite different from the one that motivated the international push for exascale HPC systems. We see the emergence of powerful AI methods, from generative language models that are transforming research, teaching (and exams!), to AI-HPC hybrid (or surrogate) models that promise orders of magnitude performance gains for some problems and the promise of a potentially transformative future enabled by quantum computers and quantum algorithms. I will focus on trying to weave together how these emerging capabilities will change the landscape of problems researchers pursue and when and how the large-scale scientific computing community is likely to evolve as it both absorbs new approaches and sorts through what is real and works and what is not yet ready for doing science. Future platforms need to be designed so that they are well suited for the problems that the community wants to solve in the near term but also need to help lead the community to new approaches that offer sustained impact across many disciplines.
Sept. 20, 2023, 4:00 pm US/Central
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University is a world-class research, teaching and training center, hosting what is designed to be the most powerful rare isotope accelerator. FRIB will be essential for gaining access to key regions of the nuclear chart, where the measured nuclear properties will challenge established concepts. The... More »