Nobel Prize Winner, Professor Adam Riess, Katzenstein Distinguished Lecturer
The University of Connecticut, Department of Physics is proud to announce the 26th Annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecturer that will be on Friday, November 15th.
[Read More]
Nobel Prize Winner, Professor Gérard Mourou, Katzenstein Distinguished Lecturer
The University of Connecticut, Department of Physics, is proud to announce that on October 20, 2023, Gérard Mourou, professor and member of Haut Collège at the École Polytechnique and A. D. Moore Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan and 2018 Nobel Prize winner, will be presenting the 25th Distinguished Katzenstein Lecture.
[Read More]
Visit by Dr. Sylvester James Gates
The University of Connecticut Department of Physics is pleased to announce the upcoming colloquium by Dr. Sylvester James Gates Jr. on November 18th in Gant West 002 from 3:30-4:45PM. Dr. Gates is a theoretical high-energy physicist who has made significant, pioneering contributions to supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. His colloquium will concern the ongoing efforts to […]
[Read More]
Nobel Prize Winner, Professor Donna Strickland , Katzenstein Distinguished Lecturer
The University of Connecticut, Department of Physics, is proud to announce that on September 23, 2022, Professor Donna Strickland of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo will be presenting the 2020 Distinguished Katzenstein Lecture. Prof. Strickland is one of the recipients of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing […]
[Read More]
Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell – 2019 Katzenstein Lecturer
The UConn Physics Department is delighted to announce that our 2019 Distinguished Katzenstein Lecturer will be Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is world-famous for her discovery of pulsars in 1967. Pulsars are a special type of neutron star, the rotating dense remnant of a massive star. Pulsars have highly magnetic surfaces, and emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation […]
[Read More]
2019 Pollack Lecture
On April 11th and 12 of 2019 Prof. Paul Corkum of the Joint Attosecond Laboratory (University of Ottawa and the National Research Council of Canada) visited the department. Prof. Corkum’s main area of research is on the interaction of ultrashort laser pulses with matter broadly defined. His most notable contribution is perhaps the discovery of […]
[Read More]Charles Reynolds Lecture 2018: Prof Andrew Millis
The 2018 Reynolds lecture speaker was Prof Andrew Millis, a Professor of Physics at Columbia University and a co-Director of Center for Computational Quantum Physics at the Flatiron Institute. Dr. Millis’s research focus is theoretical condensed matter physics. He is the leading authority in theory of correlated materials, application of new theoretical ideas to actual […]
[Read More]
Professor Rainer Weiss: Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture
The Katzenstein Distinguished Lectures series continued in the 2018 academic year with its twenty second Nobel Laureate lecturer, with an October 26, 2018 lecture by Professor Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The title of Professor Weiss’ talk was “Exploration of the Universe with Gravitational Waves”, with abstract: The observations of gravitational waves […]
[Read More]
21st Annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture
Monday, March 26, 2018 The 21st Annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture was hosted by the UConn Physics Department, featuring Dr. Takaaki Kajita, 2015 Nobel Prize Winner from the University of Tokyo, speaking on “Oscillating Neutrinos.” After the lecture, a banquet with the speaker was held for members and guests of the department. We enjoyed welcoming alumni and […]
[Read More]
Katzenstein lecture brings Nobel Laureat, UConn alumni to Storrs
The Katzenstein Distinguished Lectures series continued in Fall 2016 for its 19th year, with an October 28, 2016 lecture by Professor Leon N. Cooper of Brown University, entitled “On the Interpretation of the Quantum Theory: Can Free Will And Locality Exist Together In The Quantum Theory?” Professor Cooper shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics […]
[Read More]-
26th Annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture4:00pm
11/15
26th Annual Katzenstein Distinguished Lecture
Friday, November 15th, 2024
04:00 PM - 12:00 AM
Gant West Building GW 002
Adam Riess- Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and 2011 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Johns Hopkins University
In 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered that our Universe is expanding. Eighty years later, the Space Telescope that bears his name is being used to study an even more surprising phenomenon: that the expansion is speeding up. The origin of this effect is not known, but is broadly attributed to a type of “dark energy” first posited to exist by Albert Einstein and now dominating the mass-energy budget of the Universe. Professor Riess will describe how his team discovered the acceleration of the Universe and why understanding the nature of dark energy presents one of the greatest remaining challenges in astrophysics and cosmology. He will also discuss recent evidence that the Universe continues to defy our best efforts to predict its behavior.
Adam Riess is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Thomas J. Barber Professor in Space Studies at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, a distinguished astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1996. His research involves measurements of the cosmological framework with supernovae (exploding stars) and Cepheids (pulsating stars). Currently, he leads the SHOES Team in efforts to improve the measurement of the Hubble Constant and the Higher-z Team to find and measure the most distant type Ia supernovae known to probe the origin of cosmic acceleration.
In 2011, he was named a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal for his leadership in the High-z Supernova Search Team’s discovery that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, a phenomenon widely attributed to a mysterious, unexplained “dark energy” filling the universe. The discovery was named by Science magazine in 1998 as “the Breakthrough Discovery of the Year.”
His accomplishments have been recognized with a number of other awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, the Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize in 2007 (shared), and the Shaw Prize in Astronomy in 2006.Reception at 3:00pm in the Gant Science Light Court
-
Edward Pollack Distinguished Lecture presented by Prof. Philip H. Bucksbaum, Stanford University and SLAC National Laboratory4:00pm
10/14
Edward Pollack Distinguished Lecture presented by Prof. Philip H. Bucksbaum, Stanford University and SLAC National Laboratory
Monday, October 14th, 2024
04:00 PM - 12:00 AM
Gant West Building 002
Last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Anne l’Huillier, and Ferenc Krausz, for discoveries that launched attosecond science and technology at the turn of the century, before there were any x-ray free electron lasers. Subsequent advances at SLAC as well as other labs around the world helped to establish the breadth and importance of research at the attosecond frontier, making the case for Nobel recognition of the foundational work. This illustrates how technological advances and fundamental discoveries feed on each other: advances in ultrafast lasers are quickly followed by fundamental discoveries in physics, which then motivate further advances in laser technology. This colloquium is an eyewitness account of that story from its beginnings four decades ago to the present. I’ll describe the science behind the Prize, and I’ll explain how x-ray lasers have become a central focus for the next chapter of the saga.
Reception preceding at 3pm in the Gant Light Court
