Physics Colloquia

Detecting & Measuring Gravitational Waves in Current and Future Observatories

Pratyusava Baral
Graduate Student
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Low-latency (near real-time) detection of gravitational waves (GW) is crucial for multimessenger astronomy. I contribute to maintaining and operating the GstLAL-based search pipeline, a flagship detection pipeline used by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, for the present observing run (May 2023 - ongoing).

Due to circumstances beyond our control, the Physics Colloquium for Friday, 11/7/2025 is cancelled.

Justin Goodrich, Brookhaven National Laboratory

Due to circumstances beyond our control, the Physics Colloquium for Friday, 11/14/2025 has been cancelled.

Jong-Woo Kim, Argonne National Lab

Physics Colloquium - Julian May Mann, Stanford University Presentation title and abstract will be announced when they are available.

Effect of Phosphorylation Barcodes on Arrestin Binding to a Chemokine Receptor
Dr. Qiuyan Chen
Assistant Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Indiana University School of Medicine

Cells often fine-tune their responses to signals through chemical tags called phosphorylation 'barcodes' placed on receptors at the cell surface. Different G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) kinases (GRKs) add these barcodes at different sites, but how these patterns influence arrestins — key proteins that control receptor signaling and trafficking — has been unclear.

AI Reasoning in Theoretical Physics with the TPBench Project
Assistant Professor Moritz Münchmeyer
UW-Madison Department of Physics

Large-language models are becoming powerful enough to assist physicists with mathematical reasoning at the research level. In this talk, I will first present our dataset TPBench (tpbench.org), which was constructed to benchmark and improve AI models specifically for theoretical physics.

What Are We Learning About Super-Eddington Accretion Disks From Simulations?
Professor Chris Fragile
Department of Physics & Astronomy, College of Charleston

Accretion of gas onto black holes is one of the most important processes shaping our Universe. Understanding extremely high rates of accretion (dubbed 'super-Eddington') is vital to explaining the challenging observation that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are fully formed at redshifts >7. It is also important to understanding astrophysical objects such as tidal disruption events (TDEs) and ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs).

Physics Colloquium - Lulu Agazie, UWM Physics Presentation title and abstract will be announced when they are available.

Physics Colloquium - Ronan Humphrey, UWM Physics
Presentation title and abstract will be announced when they are available.

Combining Quantum Master Equations with Linearized Semiclassical Methods to Simulate Electronic Energy & Charge Transfer Dynamics in Complex Molecular Systems
Professor Eitan Geva, Department of Chemistry
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Photo-induced electronic energy and charge transfer plays a key role in a variety of chemical, biological and technologically-important molecular systems. The simulation of the
underlying electronic dynamics is challenging due to its intrinsically quantum mechanical nature and the large number of coupled electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom involved. Quantum master equations provide a flexible and general-purpose framework for addressing this challenge.