Physics Department Welcome Picnic
pizza truck, refreshments, and games
Spouses And Partners
Film Screening of Unconformity and Moderated Conversation with Writer and Director Jonathan DiMaio '09
An ambitious, rock-climbing geology student defies her imperious advisor to travel to the Nevada high desert, where a career-defining discovery and an unexpected friendship with a young cattle rancher force her to make life-altering decisions. Unconformity is the story of a friendship tested in the American West, framed by geology, rock climbing, land rights, exploitation in academia, and the climate crisis.
Join us for a post-film moderated conversation with writer and director Jonathan DiMaio ‘09.
NPA Seminar: Jamie Karthein, MIT, “Fluctuations of Conserved Charges for QCD Phase Diagram Characterization”
Fluctuations provide a powerful tool for elucidating the nature of strongly-interacting matter in the QCD phase diagram. In heavy-ion-collision systems, the net-particle number fluctuations are captured at the moment of chemical freeze-out. Studies of the chemical freeze-out via susceptibilities from Lattice QCD and the Hadron Resonance Gas model contribute to the characterization of the transition region of the QCD phase diagram.
Dissertation Defense: Ako Jamil, Yale University, “Rare Event Searches in Liquid Xenon with EXO-200 and nEXO”
Noble liquid time projection chambers are ubiquitously used to search for rare events such
as neutrinoless double beta decay or dark matter interactions. A detailed understanding of
light and charge transport in liquid xenon is of the utmost importance when modeling the
performance of these experiments.
In this talk I will present the design and physics reach of the proposed nEXO experiment,
YSEA Spring Into Books 2022 with Author Alvin Saperstein ’56 PhD, ‘Physics: Energy in the Environment’
Join us for a Yale Science and Engineering Association virtual conversation with Dr. Alvin M. Saperstein ’56 PhD, professor of physics emeritus and executive board member of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Wayne State University as well as the former editor of the Physics and Society, a quarterly journal of the Forum on Physics and Society of the American Physical Society. He has been a Foster Fellow at the U.S.
WIDG Seminar, Jingjing Pan, Yale, “Measuring a New Class of Jet Observables with Neural Network Based Unfolding”
Jets are collimated sprays of hadrons produced in high energy collider experiments, such as
NPA Seminar, Julieta Gruszko, UNC, “Discovering Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay with LEGEND”
Why is the universe dominated by matter, and not antimatter? Neutrinos, with their changing flavors and tiny masses, could provide an answer. If the neutrino is a Majorana particle, meaning that it is its own antiparticle, it would reveal the origin of the neutrino’s mass, demonstrate that lepton number is not a conserved symmetry of nature, and provide a path to leptogenesis in the early universe. To discover whether this is the case, we must search for neutrinoless double-beta decay, a theorized process that would occur in some nuclei.
Life’s Edge: The Search for What it Means to be Alive
In Life’s Edge, Carl Zimmer explores the nature of life and investigates why scientists have struggled to draw its boundaries. He handles pythons, goes spelunking to visit hibernating bats, and even tries his hand at evolution. Zimmer visits scientists making miniature human brains to ask when life begins, and follows a voyage that delivered microscopic animals to the moon, where they now exist in a state between life and death. From the coronavirus to consciousness, Zimmer demonstrates that biology, for all its advances, has yet to achieve its greatest triumph: a full theory of life.
Causality at the Intersection of Simulation, Inference, Science, and Learning: Post-talk Conversation
The sciences are replete with high-fidelity simulators: computational manifestations of causal, mechanistic models. Ironically, while these simulators provide our highest-fidelity physical models, they are not well suited for inferring properties of the model from data. Professor Kyle Cranmer of New York University will describe the emerging area of simulation-based inference and describe how machine learning is being brought to bear on these challenging problems.
Causality at the Intersection of Simulation, Inference, Science, and Learning
The sciences are replete with high-fidelity simulators: computational manifestations of causal, mechanistic models. Ironically, while these simulators provide our highest-fidelity physical models, they are not well suited for inferring properties of the model from data. Professor Kyle Cranmer of New York University will describe the emerging area of simulation-based inference and describe how machine learning is being brought to bear on these challenging problems.
