Following a suggestion of David Bohm’s, I will explore the possibility that phenomena associated with entanglement and complementarity in quantum mechanics intimate a fundamentally non-spatiotemporal ordering to reality by looking at low-dimensional examples of systems that reproduce the relevant phenomena. I argue that this is a relatively unexplored path to explaining quantum correlations and give some philosophical motivation.

While 27% of the Universe is made of dark matter, the particle identity of the dark matter still remains a mystery. Collider studies offers a complementary tool to explore the nature of the dark matter, in addition to dark matter direct and indirect detections. In this talk, I will discuss the collider studies of the dark matter, focusing on how to observe dark matter signals, and how to distinguish dark matter scenarios. I will cover the model-independent approach for the monojet/monophoton...

Since the discovery of superconductivity in A3C60 (A=K, Rb) in 1991 it has been debated whether the superconductivity is being driven by electron-phonon interactions, as in the standard BCS theory, or whether it is driven by electron-electron interactions, within a theory that is yet to be discovered. A second question that has also perplexed scientists, theorists and experimentalists alike, is: why is superconductivity limited to molecular valence of 3? Why is the 3 the magic number? I will...

CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, has completed its first run. We are beginning to address one of the most exciting and fundamental questions about nature: the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking. Many open questions remain after the discovery of the Higgs boson. I will begin by explaining these issues. Then I will describe how these questions can be answered in the challenging environment of the LHC

The Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS) involves the largest contiguous region of the sky ever imaged by HST. It was motivated by the study of galaxy evolution and morphology but the combination of depth, breadth and extensive multiwavelength data makes it the best region in the sky for a comprehensive study of AGN. Using deep X-ray data in the field, over 800 AGN have been spectroscopically confirmed, and the survey has particular sensitivity to low black hole mass, low accretion rates,...

Turbulent flows are found throughout nature, yet a deep physical understanding of the nature of turbulence stubbornly remains “the most important unsolved problem of classical physics” [attributed to Feynman]. But turbulence is not only a classical phenomenon. It has long been studied in superfluid helium, where quantum mechanics and quantized vortices enable means of characterizing turbulent flows not found in classical physics. Research is now beginning to address a new corner of the...

Talking is a human activity controlled by the motor system which contracts muscles to produce movement of various anatomical structures. Unlike most human motor activities, however, the goal of talking is to produce a highly-structured sound wave that carries information coded as the vowels and consonants of a language. The human sound production system is comprised of vibratory and turbulence-based sound sources that induce pressure waves that propagate through the airspace of the vocal...

Whether it is instruction on topics from biology, political science, engineering, economics, mathematics, business or physics, students often struggle to develop a deep understanding of the discipline knowledge and skills we hope they will master in our courses. There is a rich body of research from which to make informed decisions when creating instructional environments designed to elevate student achievement beyond what is typically achieved in the lecture-centered classroom. In addition...

This talk focuses on the dynamics of an important bacterial pathogen, Xylella fastidiosa within artificial plant xylem. The bacterium is the causative agent of a variety of diseases that strike fruit bearing plants including PierceÕs disease of grapevine. Biofilm colonization within microfluidic chambers was visualized in a laboratory setting, showing robust, regular spatial patterning. We also develop a mathematical model, based on a multiphase approach that is able to capture the spacing of...

Understanding thermal transport and thermoelectric effects at the nanoscale is a scientific challenge with important consequences both for practical applications in energy conversion/management and for the fundamental conceptual development of fields such as nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Recent advances in thermal microscopy, where spatial and thermal resolutions of 10nm and 15mK, respectively, have been achieved, raise a fundamental question, "On how short a length scale can a statistical...

Organic nanostructures are employed in various nonlinear optical applications including novel IR mode-locked fiber lasers, all-optical switching, and 3D updateable holographic display technology. This presentation will focus on our advances in this area including, 1. Sources: Using fiber taper based carbon nanotube saturable absorber, we have demonstrated an all-fiber thulium-doped wavelength mode-locked laser operating near 2 µm with over 50nm tuning range. 2. All-optical switching:...

Each year, for about four weeks at a time, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is configured to collide heavy nuclei producing beams with energy perhaps never before present in the Universe. We use large particle detectors and frontier experimental techniques to understand properties of quark gluon plasma (QGP), a new phase of matter recreated in these experiments. It is very likely that QGP was present in early Universe, till about 30 microsecond after the Big Bang. In this talk I will...

The 1937 theoretical discovery of Majorana fermions (particles that are their own anti-particles) has since impacted diverse problems ranging from neutrino physics and dark matter searches to the quantum Hall effect and superconductivity. This talk will survey recent advances in the condensed matter pursuit of these elusive objects. In particular, I will discuss new ways of "engineering" Majorana platforms using exceedingly simple building blocks, along with pioneering experiments that have...

Prof. Erich Varnes of the University of Arizona will give a talk for the general public entitled "The Higgs Boson: A Smashing Discovery". Prof. Varnes will describe the science and implications of this recent discovery that received worldwide attention in the media. A distinguished particle physicist, Prof. Varnes will convey the excitement of capturing this most elusive building block of nature.

Ultrafast laser spectroscopy is commonly used to study dynamical processes happen in the time scale of femtoseconds (10-15 s) to picoseconds (10-12 s). When probing complex systems with many degrees of freedom, however the 1D spectrum is usually congested with contributions from many structural components. Multidimensional coherent spectroscopy is a way to overcome this problem by spreading the spectral information in two or more frequency axes. In this part, I will focus on two-dimensional...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a Department of Energy multiprogram science and technology lab, is home to "Titan", currently the world's fastest supercomputer. Titan is the first major supercomputing system to utilize a hybrid architecture with both conventional 16-core AMD Opteron CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU accelerators on 18,688 compute nodes. This talk will present trends evolving in high-performance computing resulting in systems like Titan, and the new programming models and tools...

The compact source of radio emission known as Sagittarius A* marks the location of the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole. The energy liberated by the growth of black holes has the power to shape whole galaxies, even clusters of galaxies, but our black hole is extremely under-luminous for its mass, radiating just 10^-9 of its Eddington luminosity. The physics of this faint emission and even the structure of the emitting region remain disputed, while observations intended to clarify...

The physics of natural systems is often highly influenced by spatial dimensionality from the nature of phase transitions to the properties of materials. These effects may arise from symmetries or conservation laws. Fluid turbulence is central to transport and mixing in many contexts from atmospheres and oceans to internal combustion vehicles. Turbulence in three spatial dimensions reflects the net transfer of kinetic energy from large scales to small scales where it is dissipated as heat. In...

Symmetries play an ubiquitous role in physics. Faced with the intractable task to understand the spectrum of heavy nuclei, Wigner introduced ensembles of Hamiltonian matrices that are as unconstrained as possible - hence with randomly distributed matrix elements - up to symmetry requirements of time-reversal symmetry and/or spin rotational symmetry. The ensuing random matrix theory was further extended to unitary matrices by Dyson and later to the theory of quantum transport via the...

The confluence of particle physics and astrophysics has ushered in an exciting new frontier field by the name "particle astrophysics". While the birth of particle astrophysics dates back to Victor Hess's historic discovery of cosmic rays in 1912, the past 20 years has seen burgeoning research activities. But what can particle astrophysics do for you? In 2003 the Turner Committee charged by the US National Research Council (NRC) released its formal report after 3 years of investigation:...

Lyme disease is the most prevalent vector-borne disease in the United States, and it is rapidly growing in terms of both cases identified per year and the extent of the country that is affected by the disease. But, that's not why we study it. The disease is caused by a fascinating bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, that is a perplexing work of biological engineering. The bacterium is able to move from the midgut of a tick into and through mammals and then back to the tick. This enzootic cycle...

Localization phenomena play an important role in our understanding of the properties of graphene and topological insulators. I discuss localization at the edge of bilayer graphene and the edge of two-dimensional topological insulators. In bilayer graphene subject to a strong perpendicular magnetic field we have found that in the presence of a strongly disordered edge a sequence of localized states appears. Interestingly the localization length depends only on the size of the bulk gap but is...

Abstract: Atmospheric aerosols, including dust and clouds, play a significant but under appreciated role in our lives. For example, clouds reflect much of the incoming solar radiation thereby cooling the planet; while air molecules and atmospheric aerosols and may selectively scatter sunlight thereby leading to clear blue skies and beautiful red sunsets In this talk, Betterton provided an overview of the origins and nature of atmospheric aerosols and introduced some of the basic physics that...

Abstract: This talk is divided into two parts. In the first part, a review was given of a notion of gravitational mass of a composite classical body as well as discuss experiments, which test a combination of the Newton gravitation and quantum mechanics. In particular, what was reproduced was the well known result that averaged over time gravitational mass of a composite classical body is related to its energy by the Einstein equation, E=m_gc^2. In the second (original) part, a problem about...

Abstract: The Standard Model of particle physics has been successfully tested experimentally for over 30 years with no discrepancies. Yet a key piece of the Standard Model, and one needed to provide mass to elementary particles, remained undetected. Experimental evidence from the ATLAS experiment at the CERN LHC for the production of a new neutral boson was presented. The production and decay of this particle is compatible with Standard Model Higgs boson. Additional measurements expected...