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Dr. Lynn Trahey of Argonne National Laboratory will be presenting a seminar titled:
Advanced Characterization Techniques for Unraveling Li-ion Electrode Behavior
Faculty Host: Dr. Susan Odom
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Dr. M.G. Finn of the Georgia Institute of Technology will be presenting a seminar titled:
Chemical Biology with Virus-Like Particles
Faculty Host: Dr. Edith Glazer
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Dr. Qitao Ran of the University of Texas, San Antonio, will be presenting a seminar titled:
Mitochondrial Oxidative Stress in Cognitive Decline in Alzheimer’s Disease and Aging: Insights from Prdx3 and Grx2 Transgenic Mice
Faculty Host: Dr. Allan Butterfield
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Dr. Nicholas Kotov of the University of Michigan will be presenting a seminar titled
Self-Assembly of Nanoparticles in Liquid and Solid States
Faculty Host: Dr. Doo Young Kim
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This is an opportunity for the department's graduate students, as well as all other interested persons, to discover the research taking place in the Chemistry Department at the University of Kentucky. First-year graduate students are strongly encouraged to attend with their blue sheets, to get signatures from potential research mentors.
Observing the sky in the microwave region of the spectrum allows us to directly image the universe when it was just a few hundred thousand years old. The universe was much simpler then, simple enough that its expected statistical properties, given a model, can be calculated with high accuracy. Recent improvements in measurement resolution and sensitivity, most notably from the Planck satellite, but also from the South Pole Telescope, have provided precision tests of the standard cosmological model. In this colloquium I will introduce the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the standard cosmological model. I will explain the nature of these precision tests and what we are learning about the origin of all structure in the universe, and about the background of neutrinos thermally produced in the big bang. I will also cover how the improvements in resolution and sensitivity are opening up a new window on the dark universe, via gravitational lensing of the CMB.
Close to the absolute zero of temperature, when pushed to the edge between two phases of matter, simple lattice Hamiltonians of spins can display the incredibly rich phenomena of "quantum criticality". Quantum critical ground states are described by the most complex wavefunctions known to physicists, yet they can be categorized by "universality classes" that are independent of the details of the Hamiltonians that realize them. In this colloquium I will show how such quantum critical spin systems can arise in real-world materials, and explain our successes in developing quantum many-body simulations of a new universality class of deconfined quantum critical points.
