Particle Physics Christmas Lecture, hosted by Prof. Daniela Bortoletto, Head of Particle Physics and senior members of the department with guest speaker, Professor Francis Halzen. Professor Francis Halzen is Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center and Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin - Madison. Prof Halzen is a theoretician studying problems at the interface of particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. In 1987 he began working on the AMANDA experiment, a prototype...

Professor Heino Falcke of Radboud University, Nijmegen delivers the 19th Hintze Lecture - reviewing the latest results of the Event Horizon Telescope, its scientific implications and future expansions of the array One of the most bizarre, but perhaps also most fundamental predictions of Einstein’s theory of general relativity are black holes. They are extreme concentrations of matter with a gravitational attraction so strong, that not even light can escape. The inside of black holes is...

Professor Stephen Blundell explores the many universes of quantum materials for the 2019 Quantum Materials Public Lecture. Physicists try to find the laws that govern the Universe, discover new particles and explain phenomena. But what if the rules that govern the Universe were different? What would happen then? This question is not just an academic one. Every new material discovered is behaves like a new Universe, with different laws and sometimes new particles. This talk explains how...

Professor Barry C Barish gives a talk on the quest for the detection of gravitational waves. The quest for gravitational waves, following their prediction by Einstein in 1916 to their detection 100 years later will be traced. The subsequent opening of exciting new science, from rigorous tests of general relativity to using gravitational waves to explore the universe will be discussed. Prof Barish is a Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Physics, Emeritus at CalTech University in the USA,...

Bill Diamond, President & CEO The SETI Institute gives an an update on the search for life in the Universe. Hosted by Ian Shipsey, Head of Physics.

What is the Dark Matter which makes 85% of the matter in the Universe? We have been asking this question for many decades and used a variety of experimental approaches to address it, with detectors on Earth and in space. Yet, the nature of Dark Matter remains a mystery. An answer to this fundamental question will likely come from ongoing and future searches with accelerators, indirect and direct detection. Detection of a Dark Matter signal in an ultra-low background terrestrial detector will...

The 2019 Halley lecture n February 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the discovery of the merger of two black holes, each of which weighed around 30 times the mass of the Sun. Shortly thereafter, it was speculated that these black holes might make up the dark matter that has long been known to exist in galaxies (like our own Milky Way). I will review this possibility and explain why the hypothesis may or may not work.

Professor Jacqueline van Gorkom delivers the 18th Hintze Lecture. How do galaxies get their gas and how do they lose it? Theories of galaxy formation predict that the growth of galaxies is regulated by the infall of hydrogen gas. This gas is the fuel for star formation. When galaxies run out of gas star formation stops. Interestingly, observationally we know much more about the stars in galaxies and how the star formation rate has evolved over time than we know about the gas. The gas is hard...

Professor Mark Newton describes some of the key events in the discovery and development of Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR). Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) or electron spin resonance (ESR) spectroscopy as it is also known is a method for studying systems with unpaired electrons. The basic concepts of EPR are analogous to those of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), but it is electron spins that are excited instead of the spins of atomic nuclei. EPR was first observed in Kazan State...

The 17th Hintze Lecture, given by Professor Rocky Kolb, Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, The University of Chicago. In daily life we do not experience the quantum nature of the world on the scale of elementary particles, nor do we sense the expansion and evolution of the universe on cosmic scales. Humans, midway in size between quantum and cosmic scales, evolved to perceive nature not as it actually is, but merely as required to survive in...

Dr James Green, current Chief Scientist of NASA gives a talk on the how life may be distributed on Earth and in the Solar System with consideration of the age of our sun. This talk was a joint lecture held by the The Department of Physics and the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers. NASA's Gravity Assist podcast, hosted by Dr. James Green: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-explorer-1-jim-green-s-gravity-assist

The 3rd Wetton lecture, 19th June 2018 delivered by Professor David W. Hogg, Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, New York University In the last 20 years, the astronomical community has found thousands of planets around other stars, and we now know that many or even most stars in our Galaxy host planets. These planets have been found by making exceedingly precise measurements of stars. Some of the planets we find are extremely strange; most known planetary systems are very different...

The 16th Hintze lecture, 25th April 2018 delivered by Professor René Doyon, Director, Mont-Mégantic Observatory & Institute for Research on Exoplanets, University of Montreal, Canada It is now well established that planetary systems are very common in the Solar neighbourhood, in particular small rocky planets, similar to Earth, around low-mass stars. Thanks to new ground-and spaced-based infrared facilities soon to be deployed, it will be possible not only to find the closest habitable...

The 2018 Astor Visiting Lecture 14th March 2018 delivered by Professor Adam Leroy, Ohio State University. The Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) is the largest, most complex ground-based telescope ever built. From its perch high in the Chilean Andes, ALMA is now unveiling the birth of planets, stars, and galaxies. I will give a taste of the revolution ushered in by ALMA. This includes resolving the disks that form new Solar systems, finding the seeds of gaseous giant...

Our Universe was created in 'The Big Bang' and has been expanding ever since. Professor Schmidt describes the vital statistics of the Universe, and tries to make sense of the Universe's past, present, and future.

An introduction to the fascinating world of superconductors and the many surprising phenomena they exhibit, from zero resistance to quantum levitation. Superconductors are metals with remarkable and unexpected properties at low temperatures which defied explanation for many decades. In this talk, illustrated with practical demonstrations, Professor Andrew Boothroyd recounts the long history of superconductivity and gives simple explanations for how superconductors work and what they are...

How can we test a quantum computer? An exploration of some of the theoretical puzzles of this field and how we can investigate them with experimental physics. What is the relationship between quantum physics, computer science and complexity theory? In this talk, Dr Jelmer Renema will introduce a conceptual problem that sits at the intersection between these fields, namely: how can we show that a quantum computer can outperform an ordinary computer?

A family-friendly demonstration of superconductors in action. Fran explores the low temperatures we need to make them work, and how we can use superconductors for levitating trains. When something superconducts, it behaves as a magnetic mirror, so will be repelled from magnetic fields. We can use this property to float a superconductor above a bed of magnets. However, for this to work, the superconductor has to be very cold. Graduate student Fran Kirschner uses liquid nitrogen to cool some...

Public Lecture organised by the Aeronautical Society of Oxford in conjunction with the Department of Physics.

The 2017 Halley Lecture 7th June 2017 delivered by Professor Rainer Weiss, MIT on behalf of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration The recent observations of gravitational waves from the merger of binary black holes open a new way to learn about the universe as well as to test General Relativity in the limit of strong gravitational interactions – the dynamics of massive bodies traveling at relativistic speeds in a highly curved space-time. The lecture will describe some of the difficult history of...

Physics Colloquium 26th May 2017 delivered by Professor Miles Padgett, University of Glasgow Ghost imaging and ghost diffraction were first demonstrated by Shih and co-workers using photon pairs created by parametric down-conversion. They were able to obtain an image or a diffraction pattern using photons that had never interacted with the object, relying instead on the correlations with photons that have. In a typical ghost-imaging configuration, the down-converted photons are directed...

Physics Colloquium 5th May 2017 delivered by Dame Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell Pulsars, or pulsating radio stars, were discovered accidentally 50 years ago. Dame Professor Bell Burnell will give a brief account of the equipment used and the discovery. We now understand pulsars to be rapidly rotating neutron stars (1ms P 10s, R ≈ 10km, surface speed 10%c) which manifest extreme physics in several dimensions (average density = nuclear, surface B up to 1011T). Dame Professor Bell Burnell...

Physics Colloquium 5th May 2017 delivered by Dame Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell Pulsars, or pulsating radio stars, were discovered accidentally 50 years ago. Dame Professor Bell Burnell will give a brief account of the equipment used and the discovery. We now understand pulsars to be rapidly rotating neutron stars (1ms P 10s, R ≈ 10km, surface speed 10%c) which manifest extreme physics in several dimensions (average density = nuclear, surface B up to 1011T). Dame Professor Bell Burnell...