Professor Ben Owen, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Texas Tech University
Multi-messenger Astrophysics from LIGO to Cosmic Explorer

LIGO’s detections of gravitational waves from binary mergers made history and yielded insights into extreme gravity and matter. With more detections, unusual mergers will yield ever more information on new populations. What other gravitational wave signals will be detected, from LIGO to Cosmic Explorer? What physics and astrophysics will we learn from them, especially in tandem with new and planned electromagnetic astronomy facilities?

Michelle Larson, Adler Planetarium

Title and abstract TBA

Ionel Popa, UWM Physics Faculty

Title and abstract TBA

Deep Chatterjee, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee PhD Candidate

Title and abstract TBA

Wynn Ho, Haverford College

The Impact of Pulsar Glitches and NICER on Gravitational Wave Searches

Pulsars are the rotating remnant of massive stars and are unique probes of dense matter physics. They are famous for having very precisely measured spin rates, and this spin evolves extremely regularly for most pulsars. However, young pulsars can occasionally undergo sudden spin changes, known as glitches.

Gregory Rudnick, University of Kansas

The Life Cycle of Galaxies in Clusters Over 10 Billion Years

Galaxies live in a range of environments, characterized by their volume density. For example, the densest regions of the Universe are in galaxy clusters, which contain hundreds to thousands of galaxies all in pseudo gravitational virial equilibrium. These dense environments can in turn alter the properties of the galaxies themselves in striking ways via a variety of gravitational and hydrodynamic processes. The result of these processes alter galaxy shapes, their internal dynamics, and shuts off the formation of new stars.

Andrew Ferguson, University of Chicago

Reconstructing All-Atom Protein Folding from Low-Dimensional Experimental Time Series

Data-driven modeling and machine learning present powerful tools that are opening up new paradigms and opportunities in the understanding, discovery, and design of soft and biological materials. In the first part of this talk, I will describe an approach integrating ideas from dynamical systems theory and nonlinear manifold learning to reconstruct multidimensional protein folding funnels from the time evolution of single experimentally measurable observables.

Chuck Steidel, Caltech

Imaging the "Baryon Cycle" of Forming Galaxies

The rapid increase in the universal star formation density between z~6 and z~2 (12.5-10.5 Gyr ago) was driven by high rates of accretion onto galaxy-scale dark matter halos, but was simultaneously modulated by energetic feedback from massive stars, supernovae, and AGN activity whose large-scale effects remain uncertain. The competition between rapid accretion from the intergalactic medium and outflows driven by sources of energy and momentum originating near a galaxy's center is arguably the least well-understood aspect of the current galaxy formation paradigm.

No Physics Colloquium this week due to the Thanksgiving holiday.

Peter M. Hoffmann Wayne State University

The Physics of Life: Molecular Machines

Living beings are based on nanoscale machinery. This is no accident: the nanoscale is the only length scale at which autonomous, self-constructing machinery is possible. Only at this scale do thermal, electrical, chemical and mechanical energy scales converge. Moreover, this scale is dominated by thermal chaos. These unique circumstances give nanoscale systems the ability to easily transform different types of energy into each other and to self-assemble into ordered structures. Although living cells have taken advantage of the physics of the nanoscale for billions of years, technology is just beginning to exploit the very different rules governing this scale.