Planets form from disks of dust and gas surrounding young stars.  As they grow, these new planets inherit their chemical composition from the surrounding material and then sculpt it through gravitational interactions to form gaps and other asymmetric structures.  In the last decade, […]

Department-wide colloquium Speaker: Jami Valentine, Founder of African American Women in Physics Title: Diversity in Physics  Abstract: Dr. Jami Valentine Miller was the first African American woman to earn a PhD […]

Video of the talk Department-wide colloquium Speaker: Blakesley Burkhart (Rutgers) Title: The Turbulent Life of Gas Across Cosmic Time: Unveiling the Hidden Drivers of Galaxy Growth Abstract: The past decades have […]

Department-wide colloquium Speaker: Stephen Taylor (Vanderbilt) Title: The Road Ahead For Nanohertz-frequency Gravitational-wave Astrophysics Abstract:  The landscape of gravitational-wave astrophysics was recently broadened to encompass the nanohertz-frequency band, where NANOGrav […]

  “Opening The Era of Exoplanet Atmospheric Chemistry With JWST.” We are now one full year into the era of JWST, NASA’s flagship observatory and successor to the Hubble Space […]

Department-wide Colloquium Reserved for Open House Speaker: Surjeet Rajendran Title: "Opening Up the Gravitational Wave Spectrum" Abstract: The historic discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO has initiated a new era […]

Theoretical principles of viral capsid self-organization and genome packaging Single-stranded (ss) RNA viruses, which impact humans, animals, and plants, constitute the largest and most widespread genetic class of viruses. During […]

Interphase Chromatin Undergoes a Local Sol-Gel Transition Upon Cell Differentiation Cell differentiation, the process by which stem cells become specialized cells, is associated with chromatin reorganization inside the cell nucleus. […]

Emergence of size in living cells The emergence of macroscopic phenomena from interactions of its microscopic components is a problem permeating much of modern physics. Successes include our understanding of […]

Topology and “impossible” electronic devices Since the discovery of quantized Hall effects in the 1980s, topology has provided a useful new paradigm for understanding condensed matter systems, expanding our vocabulary […]

Title: Photonic Pseudomagnetism and Landau Levels Abstract: When electrons moving in a two-dimensional plane are subject to a perpendicular magnetic field they move in circles called cyclotron orbits as a result […]