About
The Department of Physics and Astronomy hosts a colloquium every Wednesday afternoon in 227 Gallalee Hall during the fall and spring semesters (excluding holidays and exam week). Speakers include UA faculty and graduate students as well as researchers from other universities, research institutes, and government agencies. The subject matter ranges from information about the University and department to topics of recent interest in physics and astronomy. Talks are typically 45–50 minutes in length followed by ~10 minutes of questions.
Attendance is free and open to the public. Physics and astronomy graduate students are required to attend colloquia regularly, as determined by their advisors; more information about this requirement may be found in the department’s Graduate Handbook.
Visitor information, including directions and parking details, can be found on our Directions and Parking page.
Schedule
This years colloquia can be found here. Upcoming colloquia are listed in the left sidebar of this page and under the colloquium category in the department events calendar.
Fall 2013
Unless otherwise noted, 2013-2014 Colloquium is held Wednesdays 3:45-4:45 p.m. in Gallalee Hall 227. Coffee and cookies are available starting at 3:30.
View colloquia abstracts
| Date | Title/Abstract | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 8/28 | The discovery of a Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider | Albert de Roeck, CERN and UC-Davis |
| 9/4 | No colloquium | |
| 9/11 | Faculty Interests Mini-Colloquia: How Globular Clusters Acquire Their Heavy Elements Explosive Thermonuclear Runaways in Helium Layers on White Dwarf Stars Klingons and hobbits and stars – oh, my! Science outreach at DragonCon |
Jeremy Bailin, Dean Townsley & Bill Keel |
| 9/18 | Faculty Interests Mini-Colloquia: Computational investigations of static and dynamic magnetization properties of spintronic materials Understanding nano-magnets: quantum relativistic interactions and effects Electrical transport characterization at UA |
Claudia Mewes, Oleg Myrasov, & Patrick LeClair |
| 9/25 | Growing a physics program at Arkansas: Increasing student success | Gay Stewart, University of Arkansas |
| 10/2 | No colloquium | |
| 10/9 | Adventures in commercializing research | Patrick LeClair & Brandt Hendricks, UA |
| 10/16 | On the trail of the elements: Astrobiology from a stellar perspective | Patrick Young, Arizona State University |
| 10/23 | What low surface brightness galaxies tell us about dark matter | Rachel Kuzio de Naray, Georgia State |
| 10/30 | No colloquium | |
| 11/6 | Atmospheric Circulation Models of Hot Jupiters: Exploring Exotic Regimes and Predicting Observable Properties | Emily Rauscher, Princeton |
| 11/13 | Current-driven transfer of spin momentum between magnets: its genesis and prospects | John Slonczewski, IBM |
| 11/20 | Search for new Physics in the cosmic rays with AMS | Paolo Zuccon, MIT |
| 12/4 | Neutrino physics with the SNO+ detector | Freija Descamps, LBNL |
| 12/11 | X-ray Observations of Hot Gas in Galaxy Groups and Clusters with Chandra, XMM-Newton, and Suzaku | Yuanyuan Su, University of California-Irvine |
Spring 2014
| Date | Title/Abstract | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 2/5 | Faculty Interests Mini-Colloquia:Classical and Sub-wavelength Spectroscopy in Carbon Nanotube Systems The Luminosity-Size Relation for Galaxies |
Paolo Araujo & Preethi Nair, University of Alabama |
| 2/12 | Understanding Interacting Many-Particle Systems: Accurate Theories for Liquids and Electronic Excitations in Solids | Johannes Lischner, UC-Berkeley and LBNL |
| 2/17 | From Topological Insulators to Majorana Fermions | Fan Zhang, University of Pennsylvania |
| 2/19 | Cancelled | Sefaattin Tongay, UC-Berkeley |
| 2/27 | Shedding Light on Two-Dimensional Electrons in Graphene | C.H. Lui, MIT |
| 3/3 | Cancelled | Hayk Harutyunyan, Argonne National Laboratory |
| 3/10 | A Theory of Everything at Strong Coupling | Matthias Kaminski, Washington |
| 3/12 | The Higgs Boson, Jets, and the Next Discovery | Brock Tweedie, Pittsburgh |
| 3/17 | Particle Physics Beyond the Standard Model: The Search for the Shadow World | Andrey Katz, Harvard |
| 3/19 | Searching for Dark Matter, from Colliders to the Cosmos | Sean Tulin, Michigan |
| 3/31 | Applications of the AdS/CFT Duality in Elementary Particle Physics | Ingo Kirsch, DESY/Hamburg |
| 4/9 | Computational Nuclear Structure in the Eve of Exascale | Witold Nazarewicz, Tennessee |
| 4/16 | Galaxy Evolution in Cluster Cores | Louise Edwards, Yale |