Events

## SMARTech Video Archive

May
19
Teaser:

Some years ago an anomaly was noted in the decay of luminescence in certain doped alkali halides. The anomaly was eventually explained using a factor of a billion slowdown in lattice relaxation, a remarkable stretching of time scales. This slowdown was found to be caused by the creation of a ‘breather’ in the neighborhood of the dopant. Discrete breathers are nondispersive classical excitations that are known to be significant in many natural systems. In the talk I focus on the occurrence of breathers in doped alkali halides. Several more general properties of breathers have arisen from this study, among them is the quantum breather...

Apr
21
Teaser:

In theory, quantum computers can solve certain problems much more efficiently than classical computers. This possibility has motivated experimental efforts to construct devices that manipulate quantum bits (qubits) in a variety of physical systems. One such system is composed of atomic ions confined by electric fields in a rf Paul trap. The motions of such ions can be modeled to a very good approximation as harmonic oscillators, and with suitable laser cooling techniques they can be cooled to the harmonic oscillator ground state. When trapped within the same potential minimum, ions interact strongly via the Coulomb force, thereby enabling multiple-qubit quantum gates that are...

Apr
20
Teaser:

Yves Couder and coworkers have recently reported the results of a startling series of experiments in which droplets bouncing on a fluid surface exhibit wave-particle duality and, as a consequence, several dynamical features previously thought to be peculiar to the microscopic realm, including single-particle diffraction, interference, tunneling and quantized orbits. We explore this fluid system in light of the Madelung transformation, whereby Schrodinger's equation is recast in a hydrodynamic form. Doing so reveals a remarkable correspondence between bouncing droplets and subatomic particles, and provides rationale for the observed macroscopic quantum behaviour. New experiments are...

Apr
19
Teaser:

I briefly review the formation of color superconductivity which happens in compact stars. Below the temperature scale set by the gap in the quark spectrum, transport properties are determined by collective modes. We compute the thermal conductivity, $\kappa$, of color-flavor locked (CFL) quark matter in the frame of kinetics theory. We present and compare the result with previous estimates. We also conclude a CFL quark matter core of
the compact star becomes isothermal on a timescale of a few seconds.  Moreover, we compute the thermal conductivity and sound attenuation length of a dilute Fermi gas, which help us comment on the possibility of extracting the shear viscosity of...

Apr
12
Teaser:

In this talk we will discuss a relaxation of high-energy quasiparticles in a weakly interacting one-dimensional Bose liquid. Unlike in higher dimensions, the rate is a nonmonotonic function of temperature. Moreover, it turns out that the inelastic scattering due to deviations from the integrability occurs at a much higher rate than three-body recombination processes, which is the main mechanism of losses in cold-atom-based realizations of 1D Bose liquids.

Apr
12
Teaser:

The incompressible Navier-Stokes equations provide an adequate physical model of a variety of physical phenomena. However, when the fluid speeds are not too low, the equations possess very complicated solutions making both mathematical theory and numerical work challenging. If time is discretized by treating the inertial term explicitly, each time step of the solver is a linear boundary value problem. We show how to solve this linear boundary value problem using Green's functions, assuming the channel and plane Couette geometries. The advantage of using Green's functions is that numerical derivatives are replaced by numerical integrals. However, the...

Apr
12
Teaser:

Soft and biological materials often exhibit disordered and  heterogeneous microstructure. In most cases, the transmission and distribution of stresses through these complex materials reflects their inherent heterogeneity. We are developing a set of techniques that provide the ability to apply to quantify the connection between microstructure and local stresses.  We subject soft and biological materials to precise deformations while measuring real space information about the distribution and redistribution of stress.

Using our custom confocal rheometer platform we can determine the role of shear stress in a variety...

Apr
11
Teaser:

Abstract:  Suppose that x(t) is a signal generated by a chaotic system and that the signal has been recorded in the interval [0,T]. We ask: What is the largest value t_f such that the signal can be predicted in the interval (T,T+t_f] using the history of the signal and nothing more? We show that the answer to this question is contained in a major result of modern information theory proved by Wyner, Ziv, Ornstein, and Weiss. All current algorithms for predicting chaotic series assume that if a pattern of events in some interval in the past is similar to the pattern of events leading up to the present moment, the...

Apr
07
Teaser:
The 1:1 forced complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (FCGL) is a non-variational system that exhibits bistability between equilibria and thus admits traveling front solutions. A localized state consisting of an inner equilibrium embedded in an outer equilibrium can be formed by assembling two identical fronts back-to-back. In this talk, I will first describe the bifurcation structure of 1D steady localized states that takes the form of collapsed snaking (CS) if the inner equilibrium is temporally stable, and defect-mediated snaking (DMS) if the inner equilibrium is modulationally unstable. Outside their existence ranges, the steady localized states undergo time evolutions...
Apr
04
Teaser:

We consider dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates with long-range attractive interaction proportional to 1/r^b and arbitrary angular dependence. It is shown exactly that collapse of Bose-Einstein condensate without contact interactions is possible only for b greater or equal to 2. Case b=2 is critical and requires number of particles to exceed critical value to allow collapse. Case b>2 is supercritical with expected weak collapse which traps rapidly decreasing number of particles during approach to collapse. For b

Mar
31
Teaser:

Join us for the first Blended Research @ the Library panel discussion, Post-Shuttle Age: The Future of NASA.  Panelists are David Ballantyne, Assistant Professor in the School of Physics and the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (CRA); Ashley Korzun, graduate student in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering; John Krige, Kranzberg Professor in the School of History, Technology and Society; and David Spencer, Professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Center for Space Systems.  They will be discussing the future of NASA after the end of the space shuttle program, touching on topics...

Mar
30
Teaser:

Dr. Feigenbaum received his Ph.D. in theoretical high energy physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970, under Francis E. Low. He was a research associate at Cornell University from 1970 to 1972 and a research associate at Virginia Polytechnic Institute from 1972 to 1974. He then moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was a staff member from 1974 to 1981 and a fellow from 1981 to 1982. (Dr. Feigenbaum, while creating his work on chaos, shared his office with Murray Gell-Mann in 1976.) From 1982 to 1986 he was a...

Mar
17
Teaser:

nce the realm of philosophers, black holes have now been shown to exist. Indeed, black holes as massive as 1 million to 1 billion Suns populate the cores of essentially all massive galaxies. Contrary to popular thought, these super-massive black holes are messy eaters, spewing out nearly as much (in the form of mass and energy) as they consume. This "feedback" process has been postulated to be the valve that controls the growth and evolution of their host galaxies, shaping the very evolution of our Universe. I will discuss how statistical analyses of active galactic nuclei and quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) can be used to test the hypothesis that...

Mar
16
Teaser:

The discovery by Meissner and Ochsenfeld in 1933  that the magnetic field inside a conductor is expelled when it is cooled down to become
superconducting was considered very surprising at the time. Meissner wrote that this has no classical explanation. Since then virtually every textbook stresses that this means that a superconductor is in fact not just a zero resistivity perfect conductor but in addition has the mysterious property that it can expel internal magnetic flux. In this colloquium I will present evidence that this is all a misunderstanding based on insufficient knowledge of what classical physics in fact predicts about the...