Uncategorized | Post by cdom on November 17th, 2009
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The Society of Physics Students at UCSC PRESENTS:
A General Meeting: Fermi at 17 Months
Date: Thursday, November 19, 2009
Time: 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Place: ISB 231
Thanks to those who made it to the APS meeting last weekend. There were some great undergraduate and graduate student talks, so kudos to them!
This week, SPS will host a talk by new faculty member Steven Ritz. Steven is the Deputy Principal Investigator for Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT), and he is a fellow of the American Physical Society and was a Sloan Foundation Fellow in Physics from 1993 to 1997. He also won the Bertman Prize in Physics from Wesleyan University in 1981.
This week he will talk about:
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly called GLAST, measures the cosmic gamma-ray flux in the energy range 20 MeV to >300 GeV, with supporting measurements for gamma-ray bursts from 8 keV to 30 MeV. In addition to breakthrough capabilities in energy coverage and localization, the very large field of view enables observations of 20% of the sky at any instant, and the entire sky on a timescale of a few hours. With its launch on 11 June 2008, Fermi now opens a new and important window on a wide variety of phenomena, including pulsars, black holes and active galactic nuclei, gamma-ray bursts, the origin of cosmic rays and supernova remnants, and searches for hypothetical new phenomena such as particle dark matter annihilations. In addition to a summary of results and the science opportunities, this talk includes a description of the instruments and the mission status and plans. Activities at UCSC will be highlighted.
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Uncategorized | Post by cdom on November 5th, 2009
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The Society of Physics Students at UCSC PRESENTS:
A General Meeting: “Divide and conquer” and “United we stand” in physics.
Date: Thursday, November 5, 2009
Time: 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Place: ISB 231
This week, SPS will host a talk by Professor Gey-Hong Gweon, of the Physics Dept. In his own words he will talk about:
“Divide and conquer” is a very useful mathematical strategy in many physics problems. One may also interpret this maxim as a generally useful approach to science, in the long tradition of the reductionist ideal of the ancient Greeks. However, in Nature we observe many collective emergent behaviors that are not captured well by this reductionist thinking. We may call these emergent behaviors as Nature’s “united we stand” way of existence. In this talk, I will discuss various examples of such behaviors in condensed matter systems, e.g. the superconductivity, and how studies of these behaviors have been shaping our views of fundamental physics.
