Events

Dr. Robin Canup, Vice President of Solar System Science & Exploration at the Southwest Research Institute. She will be presenting a talk titled Origin of the Moon.

Dr. Canup joined Southwest Research Institute in Boulder in 1998. Her research utilizes both numerical simulations and analytical models to study the formation and early evolution of planets and their moons. She has modeled many aspects of the formation of the Moon, including hydrodynamical simulations of lunar-forming impacts, the accumulation of the Moon and its initial composition and orbital evolution, and how bombardment may have affected Earth-Moon isotopic compositions. Her models for the origin of the large satellites of the gas giant planets have emphasized the potential early loss of satellites due to gas-driven orbital decay, and how this process may both select for the similar observed ratios between the current satellite system masses and their host planets and provide a potential mechanism to produce icy rings at Saturn. She has also developed models for an impact origin of the satellite systems of Pluto and Mars. Canup was the recipient of the 2003 Urey Prize of the Division of Planetary Sciences and the 2004 Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. She and Professor Phil Christensen (ASU) have been selected by the National Academies to co-chair the 2023-2032 Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey. Canup and her husband and their two children live in the foothills outside Boulder.

A.O.C. Nier served as a highly distinguished faculty member of the Physics Department for 42 years starting in 1938. He was actively involved in research up to the time of his death in 1994. A firm believer in “pursuits of knowledge - in areas, which cross traditional lines” he had an enormous impact on the geological sciences by his pioneering work on isotope abundances and measurements of many elements which are used in radiometric age determinations of geologic materials. He received many national and international awards in recognition of his discoveries and contributions to Physics, Geological Sciences and many other fields.

There will be a ceremony in recognition of undergraduate scholarship and graduate fellowship recipients. The ceremony will be followed by a reception in the atrium outside B50.

Abstract: "Please read these lectures last week," the late Sydney Coleman once joked.  Causality is so ingrained in our daily experience that this request seems absurd.  This talk will focus on relativistic causality: the notion that signals cannot move faster than light.  I will review its central role in modern physics and how it leads to surprising properties like analyticity in spin of various physical observables, gives insight on the dynamics of some strongly interacting systems, and restricts potential modifications to Einstein's gravity.

Professor Simon Caron-Huot, McGill will deliver a lecture in his area of research, Quantum Field Theory. He is the recipient of the 2023 Larkin Award for a Junior Researcher. There will be a brief award ceremony before his lecture.

Read more about the Larkin Award here. 

About the Talk: 

Jupiter and Saturn’s internal magnetic fields carve out a cavity in the interplanetary medium to form two of the largest magnetospheres in our solar system. Immersed within their magnetic environments are geologically active moons. Two notable examples are Io’s volcanoes at Jupiter and Enceladus’ geysers at Saturn. The activities of these moons drive ebbs and flows of the magnetospheres. One obvious manifestation is powerful polar auroras. Another consequence of this coupling is the opportunity to sound the interior of moons, leading to discoveries of global oceans beneath their surfaces.

In the past decade, NASA’s Juno spacecraft undertook the first polar orbits of Jupiter, and NASA/ESA’s Cassini spacecraft performed its final orbits, which were highly inclined and adjusted to pass through the gap between Saturn’s atmosphere and innermost ring - both providing unprecedented coverage and proximity to their planets.

Dr. Sulaiman will highlight some discoveries enabled by planetary explorers that have revolutionized our view of the solar system, ushering in a new and exciting era for space plasma processes and the question of habitability beyond our planet. He will introduce the future ESA Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (launched in April 2023) and NASA Europa Clipper (launch late 2024), as well as a proposed orbiter to the Uranus system, which was listed as the highest priority during in the 2023-2032 Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey.

About the Talk: 

While the equilibrium properties, states, and phase transitions of interacting systems are well described by statistical mechanics, the lack of suitable state parameters has hindered the understanding of non-equilibrium phenomena in divers settings, from glasses to driven systems to biology. Here we introduce a simple idea enabling the quantification of organization in non-equilibrium and equilibrium systems, even when the form of order is unknown. The length of a losslessly compressed data file is a direct measure of its information content. We use lossless data compression to study several equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium systems, and show that it identifies ordering, phase transitions, critical behavior and critical exponents in thermodynamic and dynamic phase transitions. Our technique should provide a quantitative measure of organization in systems ranging from condensed matter systems in and out of equilibrium, to cosmology, biology and possibly economic and social systems. More recently we have demonstrated that similar techniques can reveal local entropy production and the ability to extract work from non-equilibrium systems.

About the Speaker: 
Paul Chaikin is originally from New York City. He earned his Bachelors at Caltech in 1966, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971 working with Kondo superconductors. He joined the physics faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1972 where he studied thermopower, density waves, and high field phenomena mostly in organic superconductors. The lure of actually seeing the microscopics of a system led him to soft matter. He helped develop techniques to measure elasticity and motion and understand colloidal interactions. Hard and soft matter interests continued after joining the faculty at UPenn (1983), the staff at Exxon Research (1983) and the faculty at Princeton University (1988).

His interests in geometry/topology led to his founding contributions to diblock copolymer nanolithography, and studies of defects, annealing, and pattern formation. He helped demonstrate and explain why ellipsoids pack more densely than spheres. In 2005 he helped found the Center for Soft Matter Research at New York University. His more recent research centers on artificial self-replication, self-assembly, active matter, DNA nanotechnology, topological defects on curved surfaces, and quantifying order far from equilibrium.

Professor Chaikin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Science and a Oliver Buckley Prize recipient (2018). He is currently a Silver professor of Physics at New York University.

Mergers play a significant role in the evolution of galaxies due to the profound impact on several key properties, including their physical structure, black hole growth, and star formation rates. Current methods for identifying and cataloging galaxy mergers predominantly rely on sensitive, high-resolution imaging and suffer from high misclassification rates - issues that are severely exacerbated outside the local universe. Next-generation telescopes from optical to radio, however, are now enabling novel approaches to find galaxy mergers. I will present methods for identifying major mergers in neutral hydrogen (HI) surveys using OH megamasers (OHMs). OHMs are luminous masers found in ultraluminous infrared galaxies and are signposts of major gas-rich mergers. HI surveys on next-generation radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and its precursors, will detect unprecedented numbers of OHMs out to redshift z~2, as exemplified through multiple recent discoveries. At shorter wavelengths, I will discuss how JWST is already revolutionizing our understanding of galaxy mergers and helping us prepare for future surveys from the Rubin Observatory and Roman Space Telescope with the help of citizen scientists.