JILA Auditorium

Synchronization—the spontaneous emergence of phase coherence among interacting oscillators—is a ubiquitous phenomenon in classical systems, from pendulum clocks to biological rhythms. In quantum systems, however, coherence is fragile, and environmental noise is usually viewed as its primary adversary. This colloquium explores a counterintuitive regime in which noise itself becomes a resource, driving rather than destroying coherent behavior.

The interaction of the electronic spin and molecular vibrations mediated by spin-orbit coupling governs spin relaxation in molecular qubits. We derive a dynamic molecular spin Hamiltonian that includes both adiabatic and non-adiabatic spin-dependent interactions, and we implement the computation of its matrix elements using density functional theory. The dynamic molecular spin Hamiltonian contains a novel spin-vibronic interaction with non-adiabatic origin in addition to the conventional molecular Zeeman and dipolar spin interactions with adiabatic origin.

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.

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.

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.

For the overwhelming majority of organisms, effective communication and coordination are critical in the quest to survive and reproduce. A better understanding of these processes can benefit from physics, mathematics, and computer science – via the application of concepts like energetic cost, compression (minimization of bits to represent information), and detectability (high signal-to-noise-ratio). My lab's goal is to formulate and test phenomenological theories about natural signal design principles and their emergent spatiotemporal patterns.

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.

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.

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.

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.