Events at Physics |
Events on Friday, October 2nd, 2009
- Special Astronomy Colloquium
- The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer - WISE
- Time: 2:00 pm
- Place: 3425 Sterling Hall
- Speaker: Professor Ned Wright, UCLA- Physics and Astronomy Department
- Abstract:
The Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is a NASA Medium Explorer(MIDEX) currently under construction which will survey the entire sky in 4 mid-infrared bands at 3.4, 4.6, 12 and 22 microns with vastly greater sensitivity than previous all-sky surveys at these wavelengths.
The WISE long wavelength channels will be very powerful for detecting Ultra-Luminous Infrared Galaxies, and WISE should detect the most luminous galaxies in the Universe. The WISE short wavelength channels will be very powerful for detecting old cold brown dwarfs, and WISE should detect the nearest brown dwarfs to the Sun. WISE will also measure the radiometric diameters of about 250,000 asteroids.
WISE will have a 40 cm cryogenic telescope, 1024x1024 arrays, a scan mirror to freeze images on the arrays while the spacecraft scans continuously, and will take 47'x47' images every 11 seconds in all four bands from an IRAS/COBE style Sun-synchronous nearly polar low Earth orbit. WISE is expected to launch in late 2009 - Host: Professor Richard Townsend
- Theory/Phenomenology Seminar
- Theoretical Constraints on the Higgs Effective Couplings
- Time: 2:30 pm
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Ian Low, Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory
- Host: T. Han
- Physics Department Colloquium
- Search for Time-Reversal-Symmetry-Breaking Effects in Unconventional Superconductors
- Time: 4:00 pm
- Place: 2241 Chamberlin Hall (coffee and cookies at 3:30 pm)
- Speaker: Aharon Kapitulnik, Stanford University
- Abstract: BCS theory of conventional superconductivity can be described by a condensate of Cooper-pairs of time-reversed states. Such superconductors respect time reversal symmetry and are immune against non-magnetic scattering (the Anderson theorem). However, for unconventional superconductors, which do not respect Anderson theorem, there can be a class of superconductors with "chiral" order parameter for which time-reversal symmetry is broken (TRSB). In this talk we will review our recent studies of TRSB in several systems, emphasizing possible triplet superconductors such as Sr2RuO4, the study of the pseudogap state of high temperature superconductors, and the inverse proximity effect in superconductor/ferromagnet bilayer structures.
For a recent review of our studies see: Aharon Kapitulnik, Jing Xia, Elizabeth Schemm and Alexander Palevski, New J. Phys. 11 (2009) 055060. - Host: Chubukov