Colloquia 2019-2020

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 semester’s colloquia are listed below. Upcoming colloquia are listed in the left sidebar of this page and under the colloquium category in the department events calendar.

Unless otherwise noted, colloquia are held from 3:45 to 4:45 p.m in 227 Gallalee Hall, with refreshments, including tea, coffee, and cookies, served at 3:30 p.m., in 223 Gallalee Hall.

Fall 2019

Date Title/Abstract Speaker
08/21 No colloquium
08/28 Graduate student orientation Dean Townsley (University of Alabama)
09/04 Faculty Mini Colloquiua Marcos Santander (University of Alabama)

Nobuchika Okada (University of Alabama)

09/11 Planet Mercury’s Weird Magnetic Field Alain Plattner (University of Alabama)
09/18 Faculty/Postdoc Mini Colloquiua Claudia Mewes (University of Alabama)

Venkatesh Veeraraghavan (University of Alabama)

09/25 Comets and the origins of water in our solar system

 

(CANCELLED: Galaxy Cluster Outskirts: Pushing Back the Final Frontier in Cluster Astrophysics)

Dennis Bodewits (Auburn University)

 

(Stephen Walker (UA Huntsville))

10/02 Chiral matter: from quarks to quantum computers Dmitri Kharzeev (Brookhaven National Laboratory / Stony Brook University)
10/09 Pointless Physics Fedele Lizzi (Naples University)
10/16 The General AntiParticle Spectrometer: hunting for dark matter signatures with low energy cosmic ray antinuclei Sean Quinn (UCLA)
10/23 New Directions in Dark Matter
Robert Scherrer (Vanderbilt University)
10/30 No colloquium
11/06 A matter of perspective: Exoplanet discoveries, studies and compilations Angelle Tanner (Mississippi State)
11/13 CEvNS with RED-100 detector Vladimir Belov (ITEP, Moscow)
11/20 What we can learn from CEvNS? Yuri Efremenko (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
11/27 Thanksgiving break
12/04 Creating Artificial Multiferroics Using Strain-Coupling Mechanisms Michelle Jamer (US Naval Academy)
12/11 Antiferromagnetic Spintronics – A New Twist in Ultrafast Materials Ran Cheng (University of California, Riverside)

Spring 2020

Date Title/Abstract Speaker
01/08 No colloquium
01/15 Nucleosynthetic Self-Enrichment In Globular Star Clusters Jeremy Bailin (University of Alabama)
01/22 Hunting for the smallest supermassive black holes Vivienne Baldassare
(Yale University)
01/29 Cosmic Rays: are they light or heavy? Katherine Rawlins
(University of Alaska)
02/05 Placing the Solar System into the Big Picture — The Origin of Exoplanets Songhu Wang
(Yale University)
02/12 Searching for supermassive black hole binaries in the era of multi-messenger astronomy Maria Charisi
(Caltech)
Thurs
02/13
@2:00pm
The Extremes of Accretion: Ultraluminous X-ray Sources and Super-Eddington Pulsars Dominic Walton
(University of Cambridge)
02/19 Multi-messenger Astrophysics: Probing Compact Objects with Cosmic Particles Ke Fang
(Stanford)
02/26 Planetesimal Formation through the Streaming Instability Chao-Chin Yang
(University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
Thurs
02/27
@2:00pm
When stars go nonlinear: large amplitude tides and stellar oscillations Nevin Weinberg
(MIT)
03/04 Building LZ; the world’s biggest and cleanest Dark Matter detector to date Alvine Kamaha (University of Albany)
03/11 Expanding the Science Reach of Dark Matter Detection with the LZ Experiment Christina Ignarra (Stanford)
03/18 Spring Break Spring Break
03/25 Hunting for the Invisible Deep Underground Ryan Wang (Brandeis University)
Thurs
03/26
@2:00pm
First Detection of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering on Argon Jake Daughhetee (University of Tennessee)
04/01
Cancelled
Superconductivity and Quantum Metric In Magic-Angle Twisted Bilayer Graphene Enrico Rossi
(William & Mary)
04/08
Cancelled
The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search detectors: pushing to lower thresholds in search of an answer Amy Roberts
(UC Denver)
Cancelled
Public Talk: Science needs everyone: working to make a dark-matter data set accessible Amy Roberts
(UC Denver)
04/15
Cancelled
TBA Annika Peter (Ohio State University)
04/22 Galaxy Cluster Outskirts: Pushing Back the Final Frontier in Cluster Astrophysics Stephen Walker
(University of Alabama – Huntsville)

Future Colloquia

Previous Years’ Colloquia

Colloquium Clean-Up Volunteers

Colloquium – Cleanup – Spring 2020