Past Events

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.

Moiré superlattices formed from transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) heterostructures have emerged as a compelling platform for exploring quantum many-body physics. These systems are viewed as a solid-state counterpart to ultracold atomic gases in optical lattices for quantum simulation. A central open question concerns the coherence and dynamics of quantum phases arising from photoexcited moiré excitons, especially under dissipative conditions.

This is the inaugural W. Carl Lineberger Seminar which is designed to advance graduate student-organized seminars within the Physical Chemistry Program of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. The seminars address current topics in physical chemistry, promote rigorous scholarly discussion, and foster collaboration among graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers. This seminar program is supported by private donations to the University of Colorado Foundation.

String theory offers a viable theory of quantum gravity, with spin 2 gravitons encoded in closed strings.  But the failure to find evidence for supersymmetry at the LHC has left string theory in an uncertain state.  A solution to the problem is in plain sight: revert to classic nonsupersymmetric, bosonic string theory, reenvisaged as a theory of all the forces, not just the strong force.  The classic theory correctly reproduces the Brauer-Weyl (1935) algebraic relation between fermions and bosons seen in the standard model, whereas supersymmetry does not.

Many spectroscopic observations in astrophysics, planetary science, heliophysics, and earth science benefit from spatial mapping of some sort. In most cases, this requires slit-stepping a conventional long slit spectrograph or the use of a multi-object or integral-field spectrograph. The relatively low reflectivity of UV mirrors and poor transmission of most dielectrics severely restrict the design space of UV multi-object and integral field spectrographs (MOS and IFS, respectively).

While electron microscopy enables imaging of individual atoms, the sample thickness is typically limited to a few hundred nanometers. Although super-resolution optical microscopy permits high-resolution visualization of subcellular structures, it requires staining of the sample. In contrast, EUV and X-ray microscopy allow imaging of entire biological cells and other thick specimens with spatial resolutions down to ~10 nm.

The Department of Biochemistry invites professors and scientists from other universities and institutes to present seminars at the University of Colorado Boulder throughout the academic year. These seminars provide an opportunity for faculty and students to learn about exciting current research.

We show that targeted energy input from an electron beam in a transmission electron microscope (TEM), often combined with concurrent heating in a MEMS holder, drives atomic defect formation and phase transitions across four classes of low-dimensional materials: (1) few-layer transition metal phosphorus trichalcogenides (TMPTs), (2) graphene sandwich structures encapsulating either lithium droplets (2a) or a benzenehexathiol-based two-dimensional conjugated metal-organic framework (2b), (3) platinum nanocrystals on graphene, and (4) noble metals confined within carbon nanotubes.

Solar and stellar flares are explosive phenomena in which magnetic energy stored around starspots is suddenly released through magnetic reconnection. The radiation emitted during flares covers a broad range of wavelengths from radio to X-rays, each tracing different aspects of the flare process. In X-rays, the emission arises from hot thermal plasma heated by nonthermal electrons that travel upward from the chromosphere into the corona.

The Department of Biochemistry invites professors and scientists from other universities and institutes to present seminars at the University of Colorado Boulder throughout the academic year. These seminars provide an opportunity for faculty and students to learn about exciting current research.

From planting crops to making trains run efficiently, clocks have been an important tool throughout most of human history. Atomic clocks, based on quantum-mechanically-defined transitions in atoms, are currently the most accurate realizations of the second and underlie important technologies such as the global positioning system (GPS) and high-speed communications. This lecture will describe how atomic clocks work and their history, with a focus on compact clocks and the applications in which they are used.

CU Professors Kelvin Bates and Steven Brown travel the world to study the amazing, invisible, ethereal stuff that blankets our amazing planet and makes life on Earth possible.

Have you wondered...Why is the Sky Blue!? Why are sunrises orange? What is air made of exactly? How can you make your own cloud? Did you know the Earth wears sunglasses!? And what's the story about the greenhouse gases and what do they do?

This show will bring air down to Earth! It's geared for young students who are eager to learn about the science of our atmosphere.