NYU Arts & Science

Physics Colloquia

February 20, 2025 Thursday 4:00 PM  +
726 Broadway, Room 940
Physics Colloquia (colloquia)


Michael Shelley
New York University

Active Structures and Flows in Living Cells

Flows in the fluidic interior of living cells can serve biological function or act as signatures of how intracellular forces are exerted. I'll discuss examples of each. One is understanding the emergence of cell-spanning vortical flows in large developing egg cells, while the other arises in studying the nature of force transduction in single cell embryos moving towards their first cell division. Both involve the cytoskeleton, that set of polymers, cross-linkers, and molecular motors that underlie much of the active mechanics within cells, and has led to the development of new coarse-grained active matter models and novel instabilities.


February 27, 2025 Thursday 4:00 PM  +
Hybrid: 726 Broadway, Room 940 and Zoom
Physics Colloquia (colloquia)


Karri Dipetrillo
University of Chicago

Towards a Multi-TeV Muon Collider: Today's R&D for Tomorrow's Discoveries

Future high energy colliders are essential to unravel the mysteries of the universe. The question is how best to access higher energies. After decades of physically larger and larger pp and e+e- machines, a compact and power-efficient muon collider would represent a paradigm shift for the field. In this talk, I'll make the case that a multi-TeV Muon Collider is a compelling successor to the LHC, and outline recent progress in overcoming technical challenges. In particular, I'll discuss how the unique collision environment influences detector design, and demonstrate that we can extract high quality physics with existing and emerging technologies.


March 6, 2025 Thursday 4:00 PM  +
Hybrid: 726 Broadway, Room 940 and Zoom
Physics Colloquia (colloquia)


Giorgio Gratta
Stanford University

Testing Gravity at Ever Shorter Scale: A Trip into Exotic Experimental Physics

Since the times of Henry Cavendish and John Mitchell, the strength of gravity has been measured by comparing it to the reaction of a calibrated mechanical spring. While in the last 60 years planetary measurements (with natural and artificial bodies) have provided remarkable accuracy at large distance, measurements in the lab have continued to rely various incarnations of the good old mechanical springs, in many cases resulting in superb experiments and results.
In this talk, I will explore a number of drastically different techniques recently developed specifically to tackle the short distance regime, where many theories suggest something exotic may be happening. This will be a trip into AMO and high resolution nuclear spectroscopy. While science results are gradually appearing, I hope to convince the audience that, as is often the case with new techniques, a new and exciting array of questions and applications are also emerging!


April 10, 2025 Thursday 4:00 PM  +
Hybrid: 726 Broadway, Room 940 and Zoom
Physics Colloquia (colloquia)


Jesse Thaler
MIT

Centaur Science: Particle Physics Meets Machine Learning

Modern machine learning has had an outsized impact on many scientific fields, and particle physics is no exception. What is special about particle physics, though, is the vast amount of theoretical knowledge that we already have about many problems in the field, as well as the daunting deluge of data coming from flagship experiments like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In this colloquium, I will explain how one can teach a machine to "think like a physicist" by embedding theoretical principles into advanced machine learning architectures. At the same time, I will advocate that physicists must learn how to "think like a machine" to maximize the physics reach of the LHC. These joint developments are leading to a new kind of "centaur science" that, analogously to the mythical centaur, draws half from particle physics and half from machine learning.


May 1, 2025 Thursday 4:00 PM  +
Hybrid: 726 Broadway, Room 940 and Zoom
Physics Colloquia (colloquia)


Wendy Freedman
University of Chicago

Is There Missing Physics From the Standard Model of Cosmology?

Over the last decade, there has been mounting evidence for what has become known as the ‘Hubble tension’. Local measurements of the Hubble constant (Ho) the current expansion rate of the universe, are at odds with that inferred from measurements of the cosmic microwave background. If this tension is real, it implies that there is fundamental missing physics from our standard (Lambda Cold Dark Matter, LCDM) model of cosmology. I will describe new results from a major James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program to improve measurements of the Hubble constant. Relative to the Hubble Space Telescope, JWST has 10 times greater sensitivity and 4 times higher resolution in the near-infrared, and is providing a powerful new means of addressing challenges in previous measurements.