Ages 18

At Mme. Curie's Lab

In addition to being the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne and the only person ever to have won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, Marie Curie welcomed other women into her lab. It was her lab from the untimely death of her husband, Pierre, in 1906, till her own death in 1934. She ran it, enlarged it, moved it into the imposing new Radium Institute, and peopled it with an international assembly of scientists, more than forty of whom were women, including her daughter Irène, the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Revealing the Cosmos: Exploring Deep Space with the Webb Telescope

Now in science operations, NASA’s Webb Telescope is the most powerful telescope ever built. Science results are now pouring in from Webb like a waterfall. In this talk, Dr. Riby will summarize what this Webb is, how it works, and the breadth and the depth of its science program, from planets in our own solar system to galaxies seen when the Universe was young. She will touch on the power of using Webb in combination with cosmic telescopes, also known as gravitational lenses.

Dissertation Defense: Tong Liu, Yale University, "Inclusive Hadron Yield Analysis in Small and Mid-sized Collision Systems at sqrt(s_NN)=200 GeV at STAR"

At extremely high temperature and energy density, the quarks and gluons form a novel state of matter called the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). The QGP has been widely studied via relativistic heavy ion collisions in large collision systems like Au+Au and Pb+Pb. However, whether the QGP exists in small systems like p+Au, and the dependence of QGP production on the collision system size are still open questions. One way to study the QGP properties is by using proxies of high energy partons, which are created in the initial stages of the collisions, and fragment into hadrons in the final state.

NPA Seminar: Carlos Peña Garay, Laboratorio Subterraneo de Canfranc, "Science in an Underground Lab"

Nuclear, particle and astrophysics are the themes of experiments hosted in underground labs. I will discuss, after motivated by fundamental questions, recent work done in Canfranc. Most of my talk will be concentrated on the exploration of neutrinos’ fundamental properties in nuclear and particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology, but I will also discuss current work on dark matter searches. Our cells are ionized by cosmic muons and radioactivity and I will briefly close with research on life processes in cosmic silence.

NPA Zoom Seminar, Magdalena Djordjevic, Institute of Physics Belgrade, "Exploring QGP properties of through rare high-pt light and heavy flavor probes"

High-pt theory and data are traditionally used to explore high-pt parton interactions with QGP, while QGP bulk properties are explored through low-pt data and corresponding models. However, with a proper description of high-pt parton-medium interactions, rare high-pt light and heavy flavor can also be a powerful tool for inferring bulk QGP properties, as they are sensitive to global QGP parameters.