Physics Colloquia

Spring 2024

Colloquia will be offered Fridays at 2:00 p.m. (unless otherwise stated in the listings below) and the location is in SE 319. For more information contact Professor Ata Sarajedini asarajedini@fau.edu.

Date Speaker Title
Friday 2/23 Hongwei ‘Teddy’ Tan Thesis Defense: Symmetry Charges on Reduced Phase Space and Asymptotic Flatness View Abstract.
Friday 3/1 Silke Dodel  Artificial Intelligence in the Biomedical Sciences
Friday 3/8 Spring Break  
Friday 3/15 Mengyang Zhang from Princeton University A TQFT approach to 3d quantum gravity. View Abstract.
Friday 3/22 TBA  
Friday 3/29 Liang Wu from the University of Pennsylvania  

 

Past Events

Spring 2023

Colloquia will be offered Fridays at 2:00 p.m. (unless otherwise stated in the listings below) and the location is in SE 319. For more information contact Professor Ata Sarajedini asarajedini@fau.edu.

Date Speaker Title
Jan. 20 Zachary Slepian
Is Nature Its Own Mirror? Parity-Violation with Galaxy Quartets in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. View abstract
Feb. 10 Vivian Merk 
Inorganic structures across kingdoms of life: From skeletal support to metabolic function. View abstract
Mar. 3 Ilyas Yildirim
Computational studies on RNA: From structure prediction to drug design. View abstract
Apr. 14 Fernanda Jongewaard de Boer
The paraxial approximation in quantum optics. View abstract.

Apr. 27 
Building SE-319
10:00 AM

Nader Moshiri Sedeh
Comparative Pharmacokinetics, Biodistribution and Dosimetry of 212Pb (alpha-emitter) Labeled Antibody vs Peptide vs Small Molecule. View abstract.

May 3

Alejandro Rene Llanes Lopez
A Monte Carlo study of the neutron ambient dose equivalent from a proton pencil beam medical therapy unit. View abstract.

May 17

2:00 PM

Touhid Feghhi
pH Dynamics within the Drosophila Synaptic Cleft During Activit. View Defense Announcement.

May 22

11:00 AM

Samaneh Rikhtehgaran
Microfluidic Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy for Blood Analysis. View absract.

May 23
Building SE-319
3:00 PM

Panagiota Galanakou

Non-Radioactive Elements for Prompt Gamma Enhancement in Proton Therapy. View Dissertation Defense Announcement.

Oct 20

Erdem Yigit

Thesis Defense: Dosimetric Influence on the Critical Organs Dose due to the PTV Dose Uniformity

Nov 3 

Dongxue Qu

Complex Critical Points and Effective Dynamics of Spinfoam Quantum Gravity

Nov 30

Boulent Aydogan

Biology Guided Cancer Treatment: Hope or Hype?

Fall 2022

Colloquia will be offered Fridays at 2:00 p.m. in SE 319. For more information contact Professor Ata Sarajedini asarajedini@fau.edu.

Date Speaker Title
Sept. 30 Tahereh Rezaei at 2PM Dissertation Defense: Side-Channel-Free Quantum Key Distribution Source using a KTP Polarization Modulator and a Broadband Laser. View abstract. View Defense Announcement.
Nov. 18 Dr. Louis-Gregory Strolger (Space Telescope Science Institute) High Redshift Supernovae: Beyond The Epoch of Dark Energy.View Abstract.
Dec. 2 Prof. Xavier Comas (FAU) Environmental Geophysics: providing opportunities for multi-scale, interdisciplinary research from the tropics to the Arctic.View abstract.

Spring 2022

Colloquia will be offered Fridays at 2:00 p.m. in SE 319. For more information contact Professor Ata Sarajedini asarajedini@fau.edu.

Date Speaker Title
Jan. 28 Dongxue Que (FAU)
Computational Aspects of Quantum Gravity: Numerical methods in spinfoam models. View abstract.
Feb. 18 Hamidreza Saiedi (FAU) 
Modified f(r) Theory of Gravity: An Alternative Gravity Theory. View abstract.
Feb. 25 Taindra Neupane (FAU)
Efficacy of the virtual cone method using fixed small multi-leaf collimator field for stereotactic radiosurgery. View abstract.
Mar. 18 Shahabeddin Mostafanazhad Aslmarand (FAU) 
A Geometry of Entanglement. View abstract.
Apr. 22 Shahabeddin Mostafanazhad Aslmarand (FAU)
Detection and Categorization of Lung Cancer using Convolutional Neural Network. View Abstract.
May 24 Afrouz Ataei (FAU)
Novel Rheotaxis-based Microfluidic Devices for Sorting Human Sperm. View Abstract.
May 31 Tahereh Rezaei (FAU)
Side-Channel free Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) Source using a KTP Polarization Modulator and a Broadband Laser. View Abstract.
Jun. 10 Shakeel Pereira (FAU)
A Comparative Analysis of Monte Carlo and collapsed cone dose calculation algorithms for Monaco 3D treatment plans. View Abstract.
Jun. 21 Alireza Rashti (FAU)
Elliptica: a new pseudospectral code for the construction of initial data. View Abstract.

Fall 2021

Colloquia will be offered Fridays at 2:00 p.m.in SE 319. For more information contact Professor Jon Engle at jengle7@fau.edu.

Date Speaker Title
Sept. 24 Dongxue Que (FAU) Complex critical points and curved geometries in 4D Lorentzian spinfoam quantum gravity. View abstract.
Sept. 17 Dr. Liwei Ji (FAU) Toward Moving Puncture Simulations with the GHG System. View abstract .
Oct. 8 Shahabeddin Mostafanazhad Aslmarand (FAU) Quantum Entanglement from a Geometric Perspective. View abstract .
Oct. 30 Touhid Feghhi (FAU) TBA
Nov. 5 Prof. Muhammad Maqbool (U. of Alabama at Birmingham) Construction of titanium doped AIN infrared microlaser in whispering gallery mode and its possible biomedical applications. View abstract.
Nov. 19 Prof. J. S. Faulkner (FAU) Teaching graduate quantum mechanics in the twenty-first century. View abstract .

Fall 2020  (Fridays 2:00 - Virtual)

Date Speaker Title Virtual Information
Dec 4 Dr. Juan Margalef  Covariant phase space: geometry and applications Coming Soon

Spring 2018  (Fridays 2:00 PM in SE 319) 

Date Speaker Title
Jan 26 J.B. Sokoloff A Proposed Mechanism for the Difference in the Radius Dependence of Water Flow through Carbon and Boron Nitride Nanotubes
Feb 2 Prof. Zonghong Zhu Gravitational Lensing of Gravitational Waves and precision cosmology
Feb 23 Dr. Ted von Hippel  White Dwarfs, Gaia, and The Age of the Galaxy
Mar 30 Prof. Ariel Edery Spontaneous Breaking of Restricted Weyl Symmetry in Pure R^2 Gravity

Spring 2018 Colloquium Abstracts

A Propos ed Mechanism for the Difference in the Radius Dependence of Water Flow through Carbon and Boron Nitride Nanotubes

J.B. Sokoloff  (Northeastern University)

Falk, et. al., proposed a mechanism that qualitatively explains the large dependence on the tube radius of the slip length and permeability of water flowing through carbon nanotubes. Despite the fact that boron nitride nanotubes have a crystal structure that is similar that of carbon nanotubes, such large radius dependence of the slip length and permeability on tube radius is not observed in boron nitride nanotubes. The enhancement of the slip length and permeability when the radius reaches 15nm, which is much larger than the size of a water molecular and atomic spacing in the tube wall in carbon, but not boron nitride nanotubes, observed by Secchi, et. al., can be accounted for by a reduction in the contribution to the friction from electron excitations in the wall as the radius decreases, resulting from the dependence of the electron energy band gap on the tube radius.

White Dwarfs, Gaia, and The Age of the Galaxy

Dr. Ted von Hippel (Embry Riddle Aeronautical University)

What is the star-formation history of the Milky Way? How old are Galactic halo and thick disk stars? Traditional age-dating of stars relies on clusters, which only offer a limited view of these stellar populations. I will show that white dwarf stars offer a way forward. Specifically, I will show how optical and near-IR photometry, Gaia astrometry, and a Bayesian modeling approach allows us to determine precision ages (within 2%-5%) for individual white dwarfs and derive population ages.

Gravitational lensing of gravitational waves and precision cosmology  

Prof. Zonghong Zhu

The standard siren approach of gravitational wave cosmology appeals to the direct luminosity distance estimation through the waveform signals from inspiralling double compact binaries, especially those with electromagnetic counterparts providing redshifts. It is limited by the calibration uncertainties in strain amplitude and relies on the fine details of the waveform. We will show the next generation detector, e.g., the Einstein Telescope is expected to produce 10^4 −10^5 gravitational wave detections per year, 50−100 of which will be lensed. Then we report a waveform-independent strategy to achieve precise cosmography by combining the accurately measured time delays from strongly lensed gravitational wave signals with the images and redshifts observed in the electromagnetic domain. We demonstrate that just 10 such lensing systems can provide a Hubble constant uncertainty of 0.68% for a flat Lambda Cold Dark Matter universe in the era of third-generation ground-based detectors

Spontaneous Breaking of Restricted Weyl Symmetry in Pure R^2 Gravity

Prof. Ariel Edery

Recent work has shown that pure R^2 gravity (i.e. R^2 gravity with no extra R term) has a symmetry that is larger than scale symmetry and smaller than full Weyl symmetry. This has been dubbed  restricted Weyl symmetry  as it involves a Weyl transformation where the conformal factor has a constraint.  Most importantly, this symmetry is spontaneously broken when the vacuum (background spacetime) has a non-zero Ricci scalar. In this case, the theory can be shown to be equivalent to Einstein gravity with non-zero cosmological constant and a massless scalar field. The massless scalar field is identified as the Goldstone boson of the broken sector. In spontaneously broken theories, the original symmetry of the Lagrangian is realized as a shift symmetry of the Goldstone bosons. We show that this is the case also here. The unbroken R=0 sector is completely different and has no connection to Einstein gravity.