Appropriate for physicists Appropriate for all lab staff and members of the public
| Raw date | Event date | Title | Speakers | Host | Summary | Links |
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| Jan. 10, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Jan. 17, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Jan. 24, 2024 | Generation, Detection and Application of Twisted Waves of Light and Neutrons | Charles Clark, Joint Quantum Institute, National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Maryland | Doğa M. Kürkçüoğlu | Dislocations in wave trains were manifest in the 1830s studies of ocean tides by William Whewell, who discovered “amphidromic points” in the sea, where there is no tidal motion. John Nye and Michael Berry’s 1970s investigations, of fine structure in radio echoes from the bottom of the Antarctic ice sheet, revealed wavefront dislocation as a generic phenomenon. It became a broad field of science in the 1990s, when “orbital angular momentum states” of light were produced, followed by similar realizations in beams of atoms, molecules. x-rays, electrons and neutrons. Robert R. Wilson's “Tractricious” sculpture at Fermilab provides a good framework for visualizing the unity of these phenomena. |
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| Jan. 31, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Feb. 7, 2024 | Muon Colliders –The hard part | Robert B Palmer, BNL (Emeritus} | Diktys Stratakis | If you can build a Muon Collider and do physics with it, that is great. But can you? Much of what is needed has been simulated on paper but still requires a lot of engineering and demonstration to know if they are buildable. For a few parts, like the final stages of emittance cooling, we do not even have even a paper solution. I will discuss this and other challenges. What sort of effort is needed? |
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| Feb. 14, 2024 | Quantum computing with neutral ytterbium atoms | Jeff Thompson, Princeton University | Chris Stoughton | Neutral atom quantum computing is a rapidly developing field. Exploring new atomic species, such as alkaline earth atoms, provides additional opportunities for cooling and trapping, measurement, qubit manipulation, high-fidelity gates and quantum error correction. In this talk, I will present recent results from our group on implementing high-fidelity gates on nuclear spins encoded in metastable 171Yb atoms, including mid-circuit detection of gate errors that give rise to leakage out of the qubit space, using erasure conversion. I will conclude by discussing ongoing experiments on quantum error correction and reaching very high gate fidelities, and the important role of real-time FPGA control electronics developed by Fermilab in reaching these goals. | ||
| Feb. 21, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Feb. 28, 2024 | Open | |||||
| March 6, 2024 | Saving the World 101: Teaching After Staying too Long at the Fair. | George Gollin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Chris Stoughton | During five decades in HEP, I have seen remarkable discoveries: three generations, Higgs, support for inflationary cosmology…; ideas that were so very, very compelling but were wrong (SU(5) ⟹ proton decay); a necessary evolution in how we work: larger collaborations and devices, longer time scales; growing preferences for the crippling, pyrrhic victories of turf protection... More » |
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| March 13, 2024 | Inside Nature | Federico Levi, Nature Magazine | Anna Grassellino | Since its launch in 1869, Nature has seen its mission as two-fold: facilitating the prompt communication of the most important scientific developments to the relevant research communities, while at the same time fostering a greater appreciation of these great works of science amongst the wider public. In this talk, I will endeavour to explain how Nature editors apply these principles in practice, in particular by determining which few of the many excellent research submissions that we receive make it through to publication. |
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| March 20, 2024 | Open | |||||
| March 27, 2024 | Open | |||||
| April 3, 2024 | Open | |||||
| April 10, 2024 | Open | |||||
| April 17, 2024 | There and Back again: Low mass physics at the LHC | Cristina Mantilla, Fermilab | Don Lincoln | The Large Hadron Collider has exceeded expectations in many ways, from the machine to the detector performance. Its general purpose experiments, ATLAS and CMS, have produced results that were thought to be unattainable or extremely unlikely to be reached with the current dataset. This is in part due to changes in the trigger strategy and identification techniques of both quarks and leptons in the "low mass" regime. In this talk, I will go through a few of the outcomes of these changes during the last 5 years and show prospects of what we are poised to uncover in the near future. | ||
| April 24, 2024 | Nature-Inspired Design: the way to a biobased material future | Joanne Rodriguez, Mycocycle, Inc. | Chris Stoughton | With a global rise in population we are faced with the unprecedented need to manufacture more materials for industrial and consumer markets. Within the built environment space specifically, 11% of greenhouse gas emissions come from materials used within the sector. Organizations like the World Economic Forum, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the DOE National Labs, the U.S. EPA and White House are all looking at how we accelerate and promote the usage of biobased materials and nature-inspired design in an effort to lower greenhouse gases. This presentation will consider principles like biomimicry in design and the influence nature can have to a greener material future. |
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| May 1, 2024 | Open | |||||
| May 8, 2024 | Open | |||||
| May 15, 2024 | Cumulative Impacts – Science, Policy, Practice | Alan Walts, U.S. EPA Region 5, Environmental Justice, Community Health, and Environmental Review Division (EJCHERD) | Chris Stoughton | In everyday life, some people are exposed to numerous pollutants from a wide array of sources through multiple media and pathways. Chemical stressors in environmental media (air, water, land) and non-chemical stressors (e.g., social determinants of health, extreme weather events) aggregate and accumulate over time from one or more sources in the built, natural, and social environments, affecting individuals and communities. This is referred to as “cumulative impacts.” Such impacts disproportionately fall on communities with unequal environmental conditions and exposure to multiple stressors. And changes in climate can exacerbate many of these disproportionate impacts. As part of a historic investment to advance environmental justice and equity, EPA is working to improve its policy and practice in order to better assess and address cumulative impacts. This Colloquium will discuss some of the scientific and organizational work that is involved in this undertaking. | ||
| May 22, 2024 | Cancelled | |||||
| June 5, 2024 | Open | |||||
| June 26, 2024 | A Scalable Quantitative Imaging Platform with Integrated Machine Learning | Christopher R. Field, Theia Scientific | Chris Stoughton | Image analysis workflows are currently a non-scalable, biased process that requires extensive time and expertise. Attempts to generate a scalable and non-biased automated image analysis workflow using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) technologies have been thwarted by (i) limited, or impossible, access to external cloud computing resources and environments, (ii) lack of a consistent, streamlined end-user experience for distribution and deployment within these network-constrained environments, and (iii) poor interactivity of real-time image analysis results in closed image processing and analysis software. In collaboration with the University of Michigan and Idaho National Laboratory with support from the Department of Energy, Theia Scientific has developed a platform that addresses these deficiencies to enable real-time and post-acquisition quantitative image analysis with AI/ML-powered workflows. The platform utilizes a novel combination of edge or near-edge computing hardware and a modern web-based technology software stack to provide a fully customizable, simplified User Experience (UX) to run in-house or community developed AI/ML models. The platform embraces scalability by scaling hardware with AI/ML models through a novel ad-hoc clustering protocol enabling users to expand their computational resources on-the-fly. Results from recent in situ microscopy experiments at the University of Michigan and Idaho National Laboratory for nuclear materials characterization workflows will be presented along with a live demonstration and walkthrough of the web-based technology stack. |
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| July 10, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Aug. 7, 2024 | Cooking, Fishing and Jogging through Phase Space: A Practical Guide to Discovering and Understanding New Materials | Paul Canfield, Distinguished Professor of Physics, Iowa State University Senior Scientist, Ames Laboratory | Chris Stoughton | The design, discovery, characterization and control of novel materials is perhaps the most important research area for humanity as it moves into the 21rst century. A myriad of societal problems concerning energy, clean water and air, and medicine all need to be solved by the discovery of new compounds with dramatically improved, or even new, properties. The search for such materials requires a blending of skills and mindsets that, traditionally, have been segregated into different academic disciplines: physics, chemistry, metallurgy, materials science. In this colloquium I will outline the basic philosophy and techniques that we use to search for novel materials. These include a combination of intuition, experience, compulsive optimism and a desire to share discovery.[1] In the second half of the lecture, the specific case of superconductivity will be used as an example of one such search. Over the past couple of decades, a growing sense of where and even how to search for new superconductors has been developing, with the recent discoveries of MgB2 and the FeAs based materials providing, at least for me, clear guidance. [2] [1] Paul C. Canfield, Rep. Prog. Phys. 83 [2020] 016501. [2] Paul C. Canfield, Nature Materials 10 [2011] 259. | ||
| Aug. 14, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Aug. 22, 2024 | Getting to a Fusion Pilot Plant | Sir Steven Cowley, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory | Sam Posen | We are pleased to announce a special colloquium by Sir Steven Cowley, a renowned theoretical physicist, and an international authority on fusion energy. In March 2022, the White House announced a “bold decadal vision” to develop an electricity-producing fusion pilot plant by the end of the 2030s. During this lecture, Sir Steven Cowley will discuss... More » | ||
| Sept. 11, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Sept. 18, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Sept. 25, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Oct. 2, 2024 | Terrestrial tests of quantum gravity | Daniel Carney, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | Chris Stoughton | I will give an overview of recent activity based on the idea that we can test quantum properties of the gravitational field in experiments. I will emphasize the need to state precisely what hypotheses are being tested, discuss some explicit models of low-energy gravity that violate the usual rules of effective quantum field theory, and discuss some of the basic experimental challenges to getting these tests done. | ||
| Oct. 9, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Oct. 16, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Oct. 23, 2024 | The Vector Calculus of Insect Navigation | Larry Abbott, Columbia University | Chris Stoughton | To navigate through the world, insects perform many of the vector computations that are taught in introductory physics classes. They do this using methods that are rigorous but would not be recognized by students in these classes. Recent advances in the techniques used to study the brains of fruit flies have revealed what these methods are. I will describe how flies construct, add, rotate, multiply and integrate vectors, and how they use these calculations to navigator to goals such as the sources of odor plumes. | ||
| Oct. 30, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Nov. 6, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Nov. 13, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Nov. 20, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Dec. 4, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Dec. 11, 2024 | Open | |||||
| Dec. 18, 2024 | National Lab Research SLAM | Varied | Natalie Johnson | In a 3-minute presentation, early career scientists (earned a Ph.D. in the last six years) will compete to represent Fermilab in Washington, DC! In DC, researchers will have the opportunity to highlight DOE’s impact on innovative research programs that educate policy makers and others about the key role that Fermilab plays in building the STEM... More » |