Joanne O’Meara
University of Guelph & Co-Founder of Royal City Science

Abstract

Over the past decade we have made many changes to our undergraduate physics offerings at Guelph, for majors and non-majors alike. Our goal throughout has been to implement best practices from the Physics Education Research community, in such a way that we are mindful of resource implications. I will highlight some of the more significant changes we have made, such as designing and delivering an integrated course in first year that combines physics and calculus in a coordinated way, introducing gaming elements into our online course content for non-majors, and requiring all physics majors to take a course on communicating science to non-technical audiences. The seminar will also include a discussion of what we have learned about teaching during a pandemic, as well as plans for the future.

M. Lisa Manning
Syracuse University

Abstract

In multicellular organisms, properly programmed collective motion is required to form tissues and organs, and this programming breaks down in diseases like cancer. Recent experimental work highlights that some organisms tune the global mechanical properties of a tissue across a fluid-solid transition to allow or prohibit cell motion and control processes such as body axis elongation. In this talk, I will highlight universal features that emerge from models developed to predict this collective behavior. I will also discuss a framework that suggests the origin of rigidity in tissues is similar to that in mechanical metamaterials, like origami, and different from those in standard materials like glasses or granular matter.

Timbits, coffee, tea will be served in STI A before the colloquium

Stephen Hughes
Queen's University

Abstract

Willis Lamb shared the (Physics) Nobel prize in 1955 for discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum, a “weak coupling” effect that played a pivotal role in the development of quantum electrodynamics (QED), and laser science. Around six decades later, in 2012, Haroche and Wineland shared the Nobel Prize for controlling individual photons and quantum systems using cavity-QED, in a “strong coupling” regime where the intrinsic quantum mechanical coupling between light and matter dominates any losses in the system. Recently, researchers have entered a new quantum light-matter interaction regime termed “ultrastrong coupling”, when the coupling rates between photons and matter are a sizable fraction of the electronic transition energies, where many of the standard light-matter theories and concepts developed for cavity-QED break down. This talk will give a brief overview of this exciting field, covering both theoretical and experimental developments, with a glimpse of emerging discoveries and applications in physics and (polaritonic) chemistry, including the ability to create entangled multi-photon matter states from nothing (vacuum).

Timbits, coffee, tea will be served in STI A before the colloquium