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Colloquium

Colloquium

The Physics and Astronomy colloquium is a forum for invited scientists to present modern research in a fashion accessible to those with a background in physics, but who are not experts in the field. Talks are aimed at a graduate level.

The colloquium is held most Thursdays during the Fall and Spring semesters at 3:45 pm in Room 906 (9th floor) of Dale Hall Tower.

If you have questions about our colloquia or wish to be added to the mailing list for Zoom meetings, please contact Mike Strauss at strauss@ou.edu.

Looking for past talks?

 

If you are looking for a schedule of past colloquim presentations for a particular semester, you can find them in our Colloquium Archive.

Spring 2025 Schedule

Host: Doerte Blume

Title: "How to Win Friends and Influence Cold Molecules"

Abstract: A relatively new frontier in physics is that of ultracold molecules, that is, gaseous samples whose temperature is hundreds of nanoKelvin above absolute zero.  In such an environment, the molecules move so slowly that their interactions are governed by forces that would be negligible in, say, a room temperature gas.  This gives experimentalists the ability to control molecular collisions, for example to prevent molecules from reacting chemically, or else to assemble pairs of molecules into larger molecules.  In this talk I will explore the basic physics of how this control is possible, and why someone might want to exert it.  

Title: "Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter Candidates: Production Mechanisms and Detection Strategies"

Abstract: Primordial black holes (PBHs) provide an exciting prospect for accounting for dark matter. They can be produced with masses in the range required to address the present-day dark matter abundance by inflationary models that incorporate realistic features from high-energy physics and that also provide an excellent match with high-precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Such PBHs would form well before the QCD confinement transition, and hence the black holes would form by absorbing unconfined quarks and gluons. A subpopulation of the resulting PBHs would therefore acquire a net QCD color charge; some would be extremal. Meanwhile, if PBHs do constitute a significant fraction of the present dark-matter abundance, then we may expect at least one PBH to cross through the inner Solar System per decade. Such close encounters would produce detectable perturbations to orbital trajectories of closely-tracked, visible Solar System objects such as the planet Mars. By exploiting high-precision data on the motions of various objects within the Solar System, PBHs within the (as yet) unconfined “asteroid-mass’” range could plausibly be detected within the next decade, or their absence used to strengthen present-day bounds. (Based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02168https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16877, and https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.17217.)

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Host: Arne Schwettmann

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Host: John Stupak

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Host: Eric Abraham

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Host: Mukremin Kilic

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Host: Mukremin Kilic

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