2007 Program Listing
 
January 27: Particles and Forces: What is Matter and what holds it together?, Professor Rainer Fries

 
The concept of an atom was first discussed by philosophers in ancient Greece more than 2000 years ago. Modern technology has long enabled us to see, use and manipulate atoms. But atoms are not the smalles units in nature. They are built from even tinier particles. Nowadays scientists all over the world are searching for the most fundamental building blocks of nature and for the forces that hold them together. We discuss the particles and forces known to us today and we take a look at some of the huge machines that are necessary to discover new ones.
February 10: Modern Particle Accelerators and Detectors, Professor Carl Gagliardi
 
Nuclear and particle physicists use a broad range of acceleration and detection tools in their work. All you need to do is walk around your home to see many of these tools and the tricks that make them useful. We'll take that walk together.
February 17: Heavy Quarks in Primordial Matter: Elephants in a Liquid, Professor Saskia Mioduszewski
 
Sixty miles away from New York City, scientists from around the world constructed a large accelerator (2.4 miles in circumference), the so-called Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC, at Brookhaven National Laboratory. RHIC accelerates heavy atomic nuclei to almost the speed of light and then smashes them into each other. The scientists' goal is to create matter as hot as a million suns! It is believed to have existed in the early universe, a few microseconds after the Big Bang. These tiny blobs of fundamental matter "cook" in the laboratory only for a small fraction of a second, so scientists must develop special probes to gain an understanding of the properties of this matter. A promising probe is the so-called J/Psi particle, a heavy subatomic particle which is particularly sensitive to changes in the produced medium of the nucleus+nucleus collision. We will discuss how the J/psi and similar ``elephants" may help us to discover exciting properties of this novel, ultra-hot form of presumably liquid matter.
February 24: The Secret of Mass: Can we Evaporate the Vacuum at RHIC? Professor Hendrik van Hees
 
From ancient times on men have been wondering where the mass of matter originates from. Only within the last 30 years or so, physicists have discovered that most of the mass is generated by the strong nuclear force which acts between almost massless (light) quarks. The light quarks, however, assemble into massive protons and neutrons, which form atomic nuclei, the building blocks of every-day life matter. Quantum Chromodynamics, the modern theory of the strong interaction predicts that the "strong" force is so powerful that it rearranges the vacuum from an "empty void" into a dense "background". It is the "dense vacuum" which is believed to be at the origin of mass. At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island (NY), physicists try to "evaporate" the QCD vacuum by smashing together heavy nuclei at the highest available energies. Within the resulting ultrahot matter, the strong force is expected to become weaker, leading to dramatic changes in the particles' masses. We will discuss how these experiments can be used to answer an ancient question.
March 3: A Plunge into a Black Hole, Professor Alexey Belyanin
  Black holes are probably the most mind-boggling objects in the Universe. There are good reasons to think they exist, although direct proof is still lacking. Moreover, it is even not clear what would qualify as a direct observation of an object from which nothing can escape, even light. In this lecture we attempt a crazy plunge into a black hole and observe weird effects due to curved geometry of space and time. After miraculous safe return, we will collect observational evidence for the existence of black holes and identify best black-hole candidates among known objects on the sky.
March 24: Dark Puzzles of the Universe, Professor Bhaskar Dutta
  What the universe is made of has always been a fascinating question. It is only during the last few years that we have come to know that universe is mostly made out of dark matter and energy. Currently, we have several queries. What are these dark stuffs? Do we know their origin? How can we describe them? Was the universe always like this?
 
March 31: Review, Summary and Certificates, Professor Ralf Rapp
  In this concluding event, we will give a comprehensive review of the previous six lectures with special attention to the common thread running through the presentations. We will award the final certificates and give an outlook/have a discussion on college/career paths in physics.
   

2006 Program Listing
Saturday, January 28: The ABC of Atomic Nuclei: The Modern Alchemist, Professor Che-Ming Ko

Although the atomic nucleus was discovered by Rutherford almost one hundred years ago, advances in the understanding of the structure and properties of nuclei continue to lead to new perspectives. With the advent of accelerators that allow nuclear collisions at relativistic energies and with rare isotopes, nuclear physics is again expanding into new frontiers, which will allow a deeper understanding of how matter was formed from the primordial quark-gluon plasma during the evolution of the early universe and how known elements are produced through nucleosynthesis in stars. In this talk, an overview of the history of nuclear physics and the properties of atomic nuclei as well as practical applications of nuclear science will be presented.
Saturday, February 11:The Weak Force: Dancing to its own Tune, Professor John Hardy
Though gravity is the only force most of us experience in our daily life, it is by far the weakest of the four fundamental forces identified in nature. In spite of its name, the "weak force" is actually much stronger than gravity and is the most extraordinary force of them all. It is the only force that does not merely act between a pair of participants; it actually changes the identity of those participants and is thus responsible for the most common types of radioactive decay. It is also the only force that does not form a true image when reflected in a mirror. This is a force that dances to a different tune than all the others. "Just how different is it?" is a question that many physicists are now asking.
Saturday, February 25: Building Blocks of Nature: Why is Lead so Heavy?, Professor Ralf Rapp
The origin of the mass of the objects around us has always been a fascinating problem. Only within the past couple of decades have we gained deeper insights, including the notion that mass is actually "dynamically generated" through interactions between the elementary particles (the "quarks") that make up nucleons and atomic nuclei. It furthermore implies that the vacuum is not at all empty!
Saturday, March 11: Modern Particle Detectors: A Household Survey, Professor Carl Gagliardi
Nuclear and particle physicists use a broad range of acceleration and detection tools in their work. All you need to do is walk around your home to see many of these tools and the tricks that make them useful. We'll
take that walk together.
Saturday, March 25: Jet Quenching in Heavy-Ion Collisions: Quantum Fireworks,Professor Saskia Mioduszewski
Nuclear physicists from around the world are working together at the particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory to observe what happens to atomic nuclei at extreme temperatures and densities. By colliding heavy ions, such as gold nuclei, at very high energies, the goal is to recreate the conditions present in the universe directly after the Big Bang, with the ultimate goal of understanding what holds matter together.
Saturday, April 8: The Early Universe: A Journey into the Past, Dr. Hendrik van Hees
Tracing back the history of the universe is one of the greatest intellectual challenges to mankind. As we have  now learned, it requires forefront knowledge of particle physics, nuclear physics and cosmology, and their  relations. New astronomical observationsindicate that, despite the great success in understanding the ultimate  building blocks of ordinary matter, the major fraction of the "matter content of the universe" is still a wide open  question!
 
Saturday, April 22: Review, Summary and Certificates