Spring 2026 Colloquium Schedule
Schedule
| Date 2025 | Speaker name, affiliation, and topic |
|---|---|
| Jan 15 | David Vartanyan, Univ Idaho, Core collapse supernovae |
| Jan 22 | Yale Fan, Univ Idaho, The universe as a quantum computer |
| Jan 29 | No colloquium |
| Feb 05 | Mojgan Aghakhanloo, Univ Virginia, Massive star eruptions across galaxies |
| Feb 12 | Dwight Whitaker, Pomona College, Nature’s weapons of mass reproduction |
| Feb 19 | Dan Allman, Univ Washington, Pairing and interaction effects in a fermionic quantum kicked rotor |
| Feb 26 | No colloquium |
| Mar 05 | Tathagata Pal, NASA Goddard, The Roman Space Telescope and stellar population analysis |
| Mar 12 | Amber Strunk, LIGO Hanford, Communicating big science to the public |
| Mar 19 | |
| Mar 26 | |
| Apr 02 | |
| Apr 09 | |
| Apr 16 | |
| Apr 23 | |
| Apr 30 |
Abstracts
March 12, 2026
Amber Strunk
LIGO Hanford
“Communicating Big Science to the Public”
Over the course of 30 years public outreach at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory’s (LIGO’s) Hanford detector has evolved from tours in construction trailers to a hands-on outreach center with a 5,000 square foot exhibit hall and classrooms. Communicating groundbreaking science to audiences of all ages and backgrounds is a difficult but rewarding task. I will discuss how the education and public outreach (EPO) team at LIGO strives to make topics like general relativity and quantum squeezing accessible to k-12 students and the public from classroom activities to museum exhibits.
March 5, 2026
Tathagata Pal
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
“The Roman Space Telescope and Stellar Population Analysis”
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is NASA’s next flagship wide-field infrared observatory, designed to pair Hubble-like sensitivity with a field of view ~100 times larger, enabling fast, panoramic surveys of the Universe. Its powerful Wide Field Instrument (WFI) – a 300-megapixel near-infrared imager and spectroscopic instrument – will map billions of galaxies, measure weak gravitational lensing, and trace cosmic expansion to investigate dark energy. Roman’s Core Community Surveys include the High Latitude Wide Area Survey for precision cosmology, the High Latitude Time Domain Survey to discover distant supernovae, and the Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey to detect thousands of exoplanets via microlensing, including free-floating planets. Together, these efforts will allow Roman to probe the nature of dark energy, reveal how galaxies form and evolve across cosmic time, and uncover hidden planetarysystems throughout our own Milky Way. This talk will also explore the power of the Roman grism spectroscopy to study the formation and evolution of early-type galaxies (ETGs) within the High Latitude Wide Area Survey (HLWAS). Using forward simulations with tools such as Grizli, we model realistic Roman grism observations of massive ETGs across key redshift ranges to assess which absorption features remain measurable at Roman’s spectral resolution. In particular, we evaluate the detectability of age-, metallicity-, and kinematics-sensitive features (e.g., Ca H&K, Mg II, Na D, and Balmer lines) to determine their utility for constraining stellar populations, assembly histories, and chemical evolution. These simulations provide a quantitative framework for interpreting Roman slitless spectroscopy and for optimizing science strategies aimed at uncovering when and how massive ETGs formed their stars and assembled their mass across cosmic time.
February 19, 2026
Dan Allman, University of Washington
“Pairing and interaction effects in a fermionic quantum kicked rotor”
Ultracold atoms have emerged in the past few decades as one of the leading candidates for guiding our understanding of strongly correlated quantum systems. The unique capability to precisely tune the few- and many-body configurations of ultracold gases provides a multi-dimensional platform for simulating such complex systems. One of the simplest and most well-studied models that is known to exhibit both classical chaos and rich quantum transport phenomena is the kicked rotor. In its original form, it is a non-interacting model, although recent theoretical and experimental efforts have investigated the role that weak interactions play on its dynamics. Less is known about how strong correlations and beyond-mean-field effects impact the quantum evolution. In this talk I will introduce the fundamental concepts of ultracold quantum simulation, the quantum kicked rotor, and its atom-optics realization. I will then discuss our recent experimental efforts using ultracold fermions to study the effects of both weak and strong interactions on observables extracted from the quantum kicked rotor. Particularly, I will show how features in kicked-rotor spectra (i.e., its energy vs kick period) emerge and/or disappear as interactions and properties of the initial state are varied. Finally, I will highlight the potential utility of the kicked rotor as a new tool to probe correlations in strongly interacting fermi gases.
February 12, 2026
Dwight Whitaker, Pomona College
“Nature’s weapons of mass reproduction”
As sessile organisms, plants and fungi have evolved a number of diverse and interesting methods to disperse their propagules, which is crucial to enabling them to colonize new areas or escape predation and disease. Using high-speed video recordings, our group looks at how aerodynamics affect dispersal distance and the mechanisms that have evolved to increase it and improve fitness. Interestingly, plants have devised successful low and high drag solutions to increase dispersal distance through air. In this talk I will present our lab’s work to document and study several novel dispersal mechanisms from a wide range of taxa.
February 5, 2026
Mojgan Aghakhanloo, Univ Virginia
“Massive Star Eruptions Across Galaxies: A Multiwavelength View in the LSST Era”
Massive stars end their lives in some of the most dramatic events in the universe, but before they explode, some undergo violent eruptions that resemble supernovae but are less energetic, raising fundamental questions about how massive stars lose mass before explosion. In this talk, I will take you on a journey from parsec to gigaparsec scales, tracing these eruptions from our own Galaxy to the distant universe. We will begin with the most famous Galactic example, Eta Carinae, whose nineteenth-century eruption expelled more than a solar mass per year. We then move to eruptive massive stars in the Magellanic Clouds that are isolated from other massive stars pointing to an origin in binary evolution, with some being runaway stars and others the result of mergers or mass gainers. We will then explore recently discovered extragalactic analogs that show quasi-periodic eruptions, where the eruptions are likely triggered by periastron encounters in eccentric binary systems, and finally discuss the most recent JWST discovery of an Eta Carinae-like object at high redshift. These events are linked to Luminous Blue Variables (LBVs), a short-lived and unstable observational phase of massive stars during which they shed large amounts of mass and may transition into Wolf-Rayet stars. In some cases, these eruptions may create the dense circumstellar material observed around interacting supernovae and may serve as their direct progenitors, challenging predictions from single-star models. I will conclude with a detailed discussion of how the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will transform the discovery and characterization of eruptive massive stars, and how synergy with JWST, Chandra, and the Roman Space Telescope will enable a comprehensive, multiwavelength view of these transients across cosmic time.
January 22, 2026
Yale Fan, Univ Idaho
“The Universe as a Quantum Computer”
Quantum mechanics is often thought of as the domain of the very small, while gravitation is often thought of as the domain of the very large. This is a false dichotomy. For example, quantum mechanics accounts for the solidity of matter at macroscopic scales via the Pauli exclusion principle and seeds the inhomogeneities in the cosmic microwave background that allow us to probe the large-scale structure of the universe. In this talk, I’ll describe how this dichotomy fails dramatically in the opposite direction: classical gravity can function as an oracle for quantum mechanics, suggesting striking results about the dynamics of strongly coupled quantum many-body systems that would be difficult to prove or even conceive of using quantum information theory alone. This two-way flow of insight between gravity and quantum mechanics, which originates from an information-theoretic perspective on the entire universe, suggests new roles for quantum information science in fundamental physics as well as new applications for fundamental physics in quantum information and computation.
January 15, 2026
David Vartanyan, Univ Idaho
“Core Collapse Supernovae: A Theoretical Survey for the Transient Sky”
The explosion mechanism of core-collapse supernovae – the turbulent neutrino-driven explosion of massive stars – presents an unsolved problem for over half a century, since the earliest simulations by Stirling Colgate in the 1960s. Supernovae are atomic factories, high-energy laboratories, galactic drivers, and compact remnant mills. Recent improvements in high-performance computing, stellar modeling, and neutrino physics have enabled a new generation of multi-dimensional simulations of core-collapse supernovae that produce robust explosions. I present the largest multidimensional suite of simulations to-date, from the first seconds of explosion in the core to weeks later until the shock reaches the stellar surface and slams into the circumstellar environment. I discuss the joint detectability of correlated neutrinos, gravitational waves, and eventually light, from such events, which will illustrate the dynamics of the remnant neutron star, the explosion geometry, and global stellar instabilities. The results – ejecta kinematics, morphology, isotopic distribution, and signature templates – link observational and theoretical forays into core-collapse supernovae as Nature’s astrophysical laboratories.