Over the past 40 years, the Standard Model (SM) of elementary particles and their interactions has been providing an unfailing and remarkably accurate description of all experiments with and without high-energy accelerators. With the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, the SM is now complete, and we believe that we understand the physics of the very small up to...
The last few years have seen a remarkable development in our ability to control many neutral atoms individually, and induce controlled interactions between them on demand. This progress ushers in a new era where one can create highly entangled states, or study quantum phase transitions. I will present results on atomic arrays containing more than 250 atoms, including transport of entangled...
The modern market requires new multifunctional materials which should be compatible with both electronics and living organisms. In this presentation, we report on novel bio-inspired hybrid nanomaterials – the so called aero-materials based on semiconductor compounds [1-4]. In particular, we report on a novel bio-inspired 3D nanoarchitecture of GaN, called aero-GaN or Aerogalnite, which...
Contrary to general belief, quantum gravity can have important consequences for observations in present day experiments. It can predict parameters of the standard model of particle physics. Functional renormalisation permits the computation of fluctuation effects of the metric. Quantum gravity can be formulated as a non-perturbatively renormalisable quantum field theory, in close analogy to...
The quantum-mechanical amplitude for the transition from an initial state i to a final state f can be represented in terms of Feynman’s path integral. This integral includes all histories of the transition i -> f, i.e. the sum over all paths in space with fixed end points. In the classical limit this sum reduces to a sum over all classical paths for which the action S is stationary. In quantum...
As quantum technologies advance, the ability to engineer increasingly large quantum devices has experienced rapid development. In this context, the verification of large entangled systems represents one of the main challenges in the employment of such systems for reliable quantum information processing. Though the most complete technique is undoubtedly full tomography, the inherent exponential...
The history of scientists that have been awarded a Nobel Prize is by now rather extensive, the history of scientists that have been awarded more than one Nobel Prize is (for that very reason?) also rather large. The list of scientists that have not been awarded Nobel Prizes is longer still. In this talk a 101 lesson on how the Nobel Prize institution works will be given by studying the...
Timing is everything in biology – biological systems exchange information by controlling the spatio-temporal behavior of biological molecules, using dynamics to encode and decode information. Dynamic changes in the concentration of biological molecules are therefore an integral part of biological networks’ function and inadequate spatial distribution and temporal dynamics are characteristic of...
Due to its non-equilibrium character, non-thermal plasma is able to promote a large variety of chemical reactions and to produce numerous highly reactive species, and thus shows great potential for a number of applications.
This talk will present experimental results on some of these possible applications: (i) the degradation of organic compounds in water, in view of wastewater treatment;...
This talk will review different physical mechanisms involved in the emission of secondary radiations, with emphasis on terahertz waves, by laser-gas interactions. At moderate laser intensity, photocurrents can be exploited to perform a coherent terahertz spectroscopy of various crystals from air plasmas or to image tunneling electron wave packets from probing the polarization state of...
In the last twenty years Statistical Physics has contributed immensely to other scientific fields, mainly by the introduction of networks. The main reason has been the creation of the internet, which has been ubiquitous in daily life. The different structures of networks will be shown, together with their characteristics, with several different applications from real situations, which help us...
The LISA (Laser Interferometric Space Antenna) is an ESA/NASA space mission with the aim to observe gravitational waves in space at lower frequencies than it is possible with Earth bounded detectors.
It will thus be able to observe, e.g., the coalescence of supermassive black holes, which are present in the galactic centres.
I will describe the scientific objectives of the mission and...
Nuclear power, which accounts for about 10 percent of the world’s electricity supply, is currently the only technology with a secure base-load electricity supply and no greenhouse gas emissions that has the potential to expand at a large scale and effectively replace fossil fuels. However, after the 2011 Fukushima accident some countries, particularly in Europe, decided to slow down further...
