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Remote sensing of the universe, including Earth and its atmosphere, largely relies on extracting information from photons/electromagnetic waves. To optimize information extraction, instruments and data analysis have to be looked at as a system. The colloquium will highlight examples of this systems approach to optical instrumentation that I have been involved in over the past few decades.
Surfaces and interfaces play a crucial role in chemical and physical phenomena, such as heterogeneous catalysis and reactions. At the surface or interface of water, the hydrogen-bonded network is abruptly interrupted, giving rise to fascinating interfacial properties. These specific properties are the driving forces for many biochemical, environmental and geochemical processes.
Rydberg atoms in optical tweezers have become a leading platform for both quantum simulation and quantum computing. However, they are often limited by their relatively short lifetime of a few tens of microseconds. One way to overcome this limitation is to use Rydberg atoms with maximum angular momentum (m = l = n-1), known as circular states. When placed in a cryogenic environment, these states can exhibit lifetimes of several milliseconds. Circular states of alkaline-earth-like atoms offer additional advantages.
The promise of universal quantum computing hinges on scalable single- and inter-qubit control interactions. Photon systems offer strong isolation from environmental disturbances and provide speed and timing advantages while facing challenges in achieving deterministic photon-photon interactions necessary for scalable universal quantum computing.
Solar irradiance variability models supplement the measurement record by extrapolating the observations to broader spectral range and longer time periods than directly observed. Version 1 of the NASA-NOAA-LASP (NNL) solar irradiance variability models are observation-based models that prescribe change in TSI and SSI based on change in solar magnetic activity features called faculae, that enhance solar irradiance at most wavelengths, and sunspots that reduce solar irradiance.
Earth's clouds are critical for weather and climate. Cloud formation in earth and other planetary atmospheres is a deceptively simple physical process of condensation. And yet clouds are very challenging to understand and predict due to the interplay of clouds with their environment. Cloud physics spans 12 orders of magnitude in space from the micro-scale of cloud drops to the planetary scale of the general circulation and a similar order of magnitude in time from fractions of a second of cloud drop collisions to centennial climate time scales.
The remarkable precision of optical atomic clocks enables new applications and can provide sensitivity to novel and exotic physics. In this talk I will explain the motivation and operating principles of a “multiplexed" strontium optical lattice clock, which consists of two or more atomic ensembles of trapped, ultra-cold strontium in one vacuum chamber. This miniature clock network enables us to bypass the primary limitations to standard comparisons between atomic clocks and thereby achieve new levels of precision.
Hypothesized in the 1960s with the first evidence in the 1990s, the origin, quantity, and distribution of water on the Moon – and other airless bodies – is one of the most exciting questions in planetary sciences. Where did it come from? How much is there? What processes at what rates control the modern day distribution? And where *exactly* is the water? Fine-scale spatial knowledge of distribution is needed so that we can send landed missions to measure and sample for textures, elements, the presence of other volatiles, and isotopes to answer the questions above.
Mineralogy as a discipline has established the principles of crystal structure, symmetry, and chemistry that dictate all of modern material science underlying everything from computers to photonic technologies operating based on quantum mechanical principles. However, nature itself also acts a laboratory assembling naturally occurring minerals that exhibit even exotic quantum phenomena. I will discuss examples such as natural superconductors, strange metals, or spin liquids which result from the interplay of the quantized nature of electrons, spin, and lattice.
Join CU Wizards Professors Eleanor Hodby and Steven Pollock, along with Gwen Eccles, as they dive into the fascinating world of light, color and color perception - where physics and biology meet!
Einstein’s relationships between absorption and emission line spectra in vacuum[1] have a conflict between infinitely narrow lines, a finite spontaneous emission rate, and the time-energy uncertainty principle.
Mars lacks a global dipole magnetic field like Earth. As a result, the solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) directly interact with its upper atmosphere, generating an induced magnetosphere and driving ion escape from the red planet. As a key atmospheric loss process, understanding ion escape is essential for studies of atmospheric evolution and the long-term climate history of Mars.
In 2017-2018 liquid crystal research groups working independently in the UK and Japan, exploring two distinct families of rod-shaped organic molecules, each reported an unknown nematic-like liquid crystal phases in their materials. In 2020 we showed that the unknown phase in the UK compound, RM734, was a ferroelectric nematic: a 3D liquid phase with a fluid spontaneous polarization field, P. This was a notable event in LC science because ferroelectricity was put forth in the 1910’s, by Peter Debye and Max Born, as a possible stabilizing mechanism for the nematic phase.
The vicinity of small bodies such as the Moon and asteroids, as well as artificial satellites, forms a “plasma-solid boundary layer” where space plasma and solid surfaces come into direct contact without the mediation of a neutral atmosphere or magnetosphere. The importance of the research subject is being increasingly recognized along with the recent global surge in momentum for manned lunar exploration.
I will discuss NASA's Lucy mission, which is the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. Asteroids are the leftovers from the age of planet formation. But, unlike the planets themselves, they have remained relatively unchanged since they formed. As a result, they hold vital clues to how our Solar System formed and evolved, and thus can be considered the fossils of planet formation. Lucy will visit eight of these important objects between 2027 and 2033.
All chemical reactions are controlled by species we rarely detect: short-lived carbenes, radicals, and ketenes steer reaction pathways and ultimately determine selectivity and yield. Conventional tools such as GC/MS or NMR usually miss intermediates, even though mechanistic insight is urgently needed for rational process optimization.
Io, the innermost Galilean satellite of Jupiter, is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. Its atmosphere is primarily composed of SO₂, S, O, and SO, and is continuously bombarded by plasma from the Io torus at a relative velocity of ~ 60 km/s. As a result of this strong plasma–atmosphere interaction, Io constitutes a major source of neutrals for the Jovian magnetosphere, the ultimate source of its plasma and the main driver of its dynamics.