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Events During the Week of February 9th through February 16th, 2025
Sunday, February 9th, 2025: Wonders of Physics; The Wonders of Physics 42nd annual show; Time: 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm; Place: 2103 Chamberlin; Abstract: Fun, fast-paced, family-friendly physics demonstration show; Host: Haddie McLean; Add this event to your calendar; Wonders of Physics; The Wonders of Physics 42nd annual show; Time: 4:00 pm - 5:15 pm; Place: 2103 Chamberlin; Abstract: Fun, fast-paced, family-friendly physics demonstration show; Host: Haddie McLean; Add this event to your calendar
Monday, February 10th, 2025: Atomic Physics Seminar; Title to be announced; Time: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm; Place: 5310 Chamberlin; Speaker: Dr. Josiah Sinclair, MIT; Host: Mark Saffman; Add this event to your calendar; Plasma Physics (Physics/ECE/NE 922) Seminar; "Chemical mixing by stratified MHD turbulence in stars"; Time: 12:00 pm - 1:15 pm; Place: 1227 Engineering Hall; Speaker: Adrian Fraser, University of Colorado - Boulder; Abstract: In tropical regions of the Atlantic Ocean, the sun heats and evaporates water off the ocean’s surface, leaving water that’s hotter and saltier than deeper layers. While these gradients don’t drive overturning convection or Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities, they do drive a form of turbulence known as Double-Diffusive Convection (DDC), which regulates heat and salinity transport in many parts of the ocean. I will discuss how analogous conditions in stellar interiors also drive DDC, which may regulate the transport of different chemical species between the envelopes and cores of a broad range of stars. There, stellar magnetic fields can have an enormous impact on the nature and efficiency of this mixing and may resolve a decades-long tension over whether observed mixing signatures are indeed explained by DDC. I will present a suite of MHD simulations that informed our reduced model for predicting this mixing efficiency, and discuss ongoing efforts to check whether MHD DDC indeed solves any stellar chemical mixing problems.; Host: Prof. Adelle Wright; Add this event to your calendar; Plasma Theory Seminar; Journal Club; “Non-ideal instabilities in sinusoidal shear flows with a streamwise magnetic field”; Time: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm; Place: 514 Engineering Research Bldg; Speaker: Adrian Fraser, University of Colorado - Boulder; Abstract:; Host: Prof. Adelle Wright; Add this event to your calendar
Tuesday, February 11th, 2025: Physics Education Innovation Seminar; New requirements for ADA compliance in instruction; Time: 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm; Place: B343 Sterling Hall; Speaker: Jonothan Kein, Director, L&S Instructional Design Collaborative, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Abstract: Jonothan Kein, Director, L&S Instructional Design Collaborative, Will Burns, Director of the Center for User Experience (CUE), and Al Nemec, Digital Accessibility Program Manager, and Mitch Keller (Math Department) will present progress on supporting new instructional ADA compliance requirements for calendar year 2026. All faculty and instructional staff are encouraged to attend. In-person forum for discussion. Zoom link for remote attendance:; Add this event to your calendar; Wisconsin Quantum Institute; Quantum Coffee Hour; Time: 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm; Place: Rm.5294, Chamberlin Hall; Abstract: Please join us for the WQI Quantum Coffee today at 3PM in the Physics Faculty Lounge (Rm.5294 in Chamberlin Hall). This series, which takes place approximately every other Tuesday, aims to foster a casual and collaborative atmosphere where faculty, post-docs, students, and anyone with an interest in quantum information sciences can come together. There will be coffee and treats.; Add this event to your calendar
Wednesday, February 12th, 2025: Department Meeting; Time: 12:15 pm - 1:00 pm; Place: B343 Sterling Hall; Speaker: Kevin Black, UW - Madison; Host: Kevin Black; Add this event to your calendar
Thursday, February 13th, 2025: R. G. Herb Condensed Matter Seminar; Past, present, and future of Superconducting Diode Effects; Time: 10:00 am; Place: 5310 Chamberlin; Speaker: Daniel Shaffer , UW-Madison; Abstract: The critical current in superconducting systems that lack both time reversal and inversion symmetries is generally non-reciprocal, i.e. unequal in magnitude for opposite current flow directions. This effect — called the superconducting diode effect (SDE) in bulk superconductors and the Josephson diode effect (JDE) in Josephson junctions — has attracted a lot of attention among both experimentalists and theorists, promising many applications for superconducting electronics. Nevertheless, a proper theoretical description of SDE has been challenging both on the phenomenological and microscopic levels, even for the simplest canonical model of the helical non-centrosymmetric superconductor with Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and in-plane magnetic field. Despite the relative simplicity of the model, several conflicting results have been obtained in the literature, including a prediction of the absence of SDE in the weak field limit. In this talk, I will review some of these controversies and present our resolution, which underscores the subtlety of the effect. Building on this understanding, I will also discuss several new microscopic mechanisms that we proposed for realizing or enhancing the SDE in disordered Rashba superconductors, as well as generic multiphase superconductors like UPt3 and UTe2.; Host: Alex Levchenko; Add this event to your calendar; Atomic Physics Seminar; Making and probing Bose-Einstein condensates of polar molecules; Time: 11:00 am - 12:00 pm; Place: 5310 Chamberlin; Speaker: Dr. Ian Stevenson, Columbia University; Abstract: Recently, our lab realized the first BEC of polar molecules. By eliminating two- and three-body collisional losses via double microwave shielding, gases of sodium-cesium molecules are evaporatively cooled to quantum degeneracy. The BEC reveals itself via a bimodal momentum distribution when the phase-space density exceeds one. In this talk, I will share our latest insights into controlling the dipolar interactions in the BEC. Notably, we find that as dipolar interactions increase, their characteristic length scale exceeds the interparticle separation, signifying the onset of strong interactions.; Host: Mark Saffman; Add this event to your calendar; Astronomy Colloquium; Vera C. Rubin Observatory On-sky Commissioning; Time: 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm; Place: 4421 Sterling Hall; Speaker: Keith Bechtol, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Abstract: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is poised to begin a wide, fast, and deep imaging survey of the entire night sky visible from Chile's Atacama desert with the goal of measuring more stars, galaxies, optical transients, and Solar System objects during its first year of science operations in 2025-2026 than all previous cosmic surveys combined. In October-December 2024, Rubin Observatory conducted a 7-week on-sky commissioning campaign using an engineering camera as a first full-system test of hardware, software, and operational procedures. The next months are focused on installation and first night sky images with the full LSST Camera. I will discuss the pathway from commissioning to realizing first cosmology results with Rubin Observatory, and highlight ways for our local UW-Madison astrophysics community to get involved with Rubin Observatory science.; Host: Melinda Soares-Furtado; Add this event to your calendar
Friday, February 14th, 2025: Physics Department Colloquium; Discovering the Particle Physics of Dark Matter with Cosmology; Time: 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm; Place: 2241 CH; Speaker: Hongwan Liu, Boston University; Abstract: The fundamental nature of dark matter is one of the biggest open questions in physics today. In this talk, I will discuss what we have learned about dark matter from its gravitational effects, and explore the unique role cosmology has to play in revealing the composition of dark matter, as well as any potential interaction it may have with Standard Model particles.; Host: Khatee Zathul Arifa; Add this event to your calendar
Saturday, February 15th, 2025: Wonders of Physics; The Wonders of Physics 42nd annual show; Time: 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm; Place: 2103 Chamberlin; Abstract: Fun, fast-paced, family-friendly physics demonstration show; Host: Haddie McLean; Add this event to your calendar; Outreach; Physics Fair; Time: 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm; Place: 2nd Floor of Chamberlin Hall; Abstract: The Physics Fair is an annual Department of Physics open house that typically includes laboratory tours, hands-on demonstrations, activities for kids and families, and informal conversations with scientists. No tickets or RSVP are required for the Physics Fair.

The 2025 Physics Fair is scheduled for Saturday, February 15 from 2-4pm in Chamberlin Hall.; Host: Sarah Parker; Attachments: library advertising 2025.pdf; Add this event to your calendar; Wonders of Physics; The Wonders of Physics 42nd annual show; Time: 4:00 pm - 5:15 pm; Place: 2103 Chamberlin; Abstract: Fun, fast-paced, family-friendly physics demonstration show; Host: Haddie McLean; Add this event to your calendar
Sunday, February 16th, 2025: Wonders of Physics; The Wonders of Physics 42nd annual show; Time: 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm; Place: 2103 Chamberlin; Abstract: Fun, fast-paced, family-friendly physics demonstration show; Host: Haddie McLean; Add this event to your calendar; Wonders of Physics; The Wonders of Physics 42nd annual show; Time: 4:00 pm - 5:15 pm; Place: 2103 Chamberlin; Abstract: Fun, fast-paced, family-friendly physics demonstration show; Host: Haddie McLean; Add this event to your calendar

Events During the Week of February 9th through February 16th, 2025