How different would our Universe look with the addition of extra kinds of particles and interactions? We already have ample gravitational evidence for at least one new type of matter (“dark matter”) that has properties unlike any particle we have previously discovered. It is possible that the dark matter is made of many kinds of different particles that experience forces and interactions unlike the ones we are familiar with from the Standard Model. If these new forces only act on dark matter particles, it may be difficult to discover them and learn more about what is happening in this “dark sector.” However, we know that dark matter and visible matter interact gravitationally at the very minimum— in this talk, I will show that this fact alone is a good reason not to lose hope because dark forces affecting the spatial distribution of dark matter will have a gravitational impact on the visible matter that we can see. I will talk about a few examples of broad classes of dark sectors where we can look for their effects using existing or upcoming datasets.

About Dr. Schutz:
Dr. Katelin Schutz is a NASA Einstein Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow in the MIT Department of Physics. Katelin received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2019 under the supervision of Hitoshi Murayama with the support of fellowships from the Hertz Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Katelin's doctoral work was recognized by the American Physical Society, which awarded her the Sakurai Dissertation Award in theoretical particle physics, citing her highly original contributions to this area of inquiry. The ultimate goal of Katelin's ongoing research is to recover every bit of information about what our Universe is made of by considering how astrophysical systems would be affected with the addition of new particles and forces. While primarily a theorist, Katelin has been known to occasionally roll up her sleeves and get into the data. Katelin will be starting as an assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal starting in August 2021, where she will form a research group jointly in the Centre for High Energy Physics and in the McGill Space Institute.

I will discuss a bit of my personal history at MIT and my work there in the late 1970's. Four decades later I am back, building a successful company, EyeQue, in the area of vision testing based on using an MIT patented technology. Building the company brought back many of the skills I needed as a physics graduate student. Will cover the company core optical technologies and the science behind the technology and will also cover the start-up culture and environment. Based on my experience will discuss what it takes to build a successful start-up.

About Dr. Serri:

Dr. John A. Serri, PhD 1980, course 8, co-founded EyeQue, a company that creates award-winning at-home vision monitoring devices that bring affordable vision testing to billions of people worldwide. Based on MIT patented technology, Serri and his team created a smartphone-powered refraction test that empowers people to test their vision and track changes over time. Under his guidance, the company has introduced five optical devices for at-home and mobile vision screening in as many years. As President, Dr. Serri is focused on growing the company in the U.S. and internationally, raising more than $26 million dollars in investment to date.

Prior to EyeQue, his long career included executive leadership roles at major corporations including AT&T, Bell Laboratories, Lockheed Martin, Loral Space Systems, Globalstar, and Trimble Navigation. Serri has published over twenty peer reviewed articles in physics, chemistry, and engineering, holds a number of patents in communications and vision testing, and has served as a professor of computer science and astronomy. Serri was one of the lead designers and developers at Globalstar, one of the world’s largest satellite networks. At MIT, he worked with Bill Phillips (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1997) and David Pritchard, Ida Green Professor of Physics, in the area of atomic and molecular physics. He is frequently asked to speak about entrepreneurship and EyeQue. He has been recently featured on CBS Innovation Nation.

For hobbies he is also an accomplished published keyboard artist and composer and enjoys raising tropical fish and tending to his vegetable garden. Serri earned a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from SUNY Albany and a PhD in Physics from MIT.

Many materials that we understand well, such as metals and semiconductors, often can be described in a picture with non-interacting electrons. However, in certain systems, electronic interactions play a dominant role and lead to exotic phases of matter, ranging from magnetism to high-temperature superconductivity. Here, I will introduce a new kind of such strongly correlated system: magic-angle twisted graphene. When two sheets of graphene, a single-atom thick sheet of graphite, are twisted at a small angle, the so-called magic-angle, Dirac fermions from the two sheets hybridize and form nearly flat bands, where the electrons can be considered localized and feel more Coulomb interactions. In these flat bands, insulator states that were absent in the non-interacting picture were observed, and more astonishingly, superconductivity was discovered! In addition, an anomalous magnetic state was observed in the same system. More recently, we showed that twisting three sheets of graphene in a particular fashion also results in superconductivity, perhaps an even more exotic one than the bilayer case. Our magic-angle systems establish a new generation of tunable platform that can revolutionize our fundamental understanding and the applications of strongly correlated physics in two-dimensions.

About Jane:

Jane (Jeong Min) was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, before she went to Duke University and obtained her B.S. degrees in Physics and in Chemistry. While carrying out her undergraduate research project on quantum frustrated magnets and conducting inelastic neutron scattering experiments, she found her interest in condensed matter physics. Since 2018, she has been working as a PhD student in Prof. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero’s group at MIT, performing transport experiments to understand strongly correlated phenomena in magic-angle twisted graphene systems. Outside the lab, she enjoys building Legos, lifting weights, and singing at the MIT TCC choir.

There are a lot of exciting neutrino physics research opportunities at MIT. The professors here each specialize in a different subfield of neutrino physics seeking to resolve fundamental questions, often with extraordinary experiments. This means that the span of research taking place at MIT is extensive. In this presentation, I will describe the research that I have been involved with throughout my career at MIT and highlight some of the more unique experiences. Most generally, I will focus the discussion on searches for sterile neutrinos and neutrinoless double beta decay.

About Dr. Axani:

Dr. Axani was born in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, near the rocky mountains, an iconic area for the early days of paleontology, famous area for the snowboarding and skiing, and high quality steaks. In 2007, he attended the Southern Institute of Technology to study Power Engineering Technologies. After earning a 3rd Class Power Engineer certification and worked in the field for several years, in 2011, he went back to university to study physics. In 2014, he graduated with a degree in Honors Physics at the University of Alberta, and was accepted into the PhD program at MIT and joined Prof. Janet Conrad's group. In early 2019, he wrote a Masters thesis on the development of a portable cosmic ray muon detector. and began outreach project CosmicWatch. Then in late 2019, he defended his PhD on searches for sterile neutrinos using the IceCube detector and joined Prof. Lindley Winslow's group at MIT for a PostDoc. He is currently working on a search for neutrinoless double beta decay with the KamLAND detector in Japan.

Quantum technology offers the possibility to solve hard problems which are beyond the capability of classical computers. Quantum computers and simulators with large arrays of individually trapped neutral atoms are becoming a reality, in which highly excited atomic Rydberg states can be used to implement gate operations, generate entangled many-body states, and simulate quantum spin models. While the quantum processors can operate on microsecond timescales, the array preparation process and the state readout require several to many milliseconds. Here, we propose a new approach for building quantum computers by encoding qubits with different Rydberg excitations embedded inside a small atomic ensemble. By harnessing collective effects in an atomic ensemble, we experimentally demonstrate the fast preparation, manipulation and collective readout of this Rydberg qubit. In future, we can use the arrays of Rydberg ensemble qubits for quantum simulation and computation at a much higher speed.

About Dr. Xu:

Wenchao Xu is a postdoctoral associate with research interests centered on implementing quantum information science with neutral atoms, by harnessing the strong interactions between Rydberg atoms and the quantum nonlinear optical effects in atomic ensembles. Wenchao completed her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with Prof. Brian DeMarco. At UIUC, her research focused on the dynamics of ultracold fermions trapped in optical lattices. This experimental platform realized an analog quantum emulator, which provides insights into open questions in condensed matter physics

Quasars are the most luminous objects in the universe and can be observed at the earliest cosmic epochs, providing unique insights into the early phases of black hole, structure, and galaxy formation. Observations of these quasars demonstrate that they host supermassive black holes at their center, already less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The formation and growth of these black holes in such short amounts of cosmic time is a crucial yet unanswered question in studies of quasar and galaxy evolution. An important piece of the puzzle is the lifetime of quasars - the time that galaxies shine as active quasars and during which the bulk of the black hole growth occurs - but to date its value remains uncertain by several orders of magnitude. I will present a new method to obtain independent constraints on the lifetime of high redshift quasars, based on measurements of the sizes of the ionized regions around quasars, known as proximity zones. Puzzlingly, this new method reveals quasar lifetimes that are orders of magnitude shorter than expected, posing significant challenges on all current black hole formation models. Several modifications to the standard black hole growth model have been suggested in order to explain their rapid growth, which we will be able to test observationally with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.

About Dr. Eilers:

Christina Eilers received her BSc in Physics from the University of Goettingen in Germany with a focus on neuroscience. After an internship at the European Space Agency in The Netherlands she decided to study astrophysics at the University of Heidelberg, from where she received her MSc. Eilers completed her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, working with Prof. Joseph Hennawi on high redshift quasars and the growth of supermassive black holes, as well as with Profs. Hans-Walter Rix and David W. Hogg on the dynamics of the Milky Way. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, traveling to remote places, playing music and volleyball.

With recent developments in quantum technologies, we can now construct larger quantum computers, build more sophisticated quantum devices, and synthesize complicated materials that realize novel phases of matter. These advances have also brought new challenges. Directly simulating these quantum systems is beyond the reach of classical computers and the experimental data generated by performing measurements on them could be prohibitively large and complex. It therefore remains unclear how we can characterize and study the properties of these systems or test the accuracy of our theoretical models. In this talk, I will present the first provably efficient method to infer the interactions between quantum particles, encoded in their Hamiltonian, using a feasible number of measurements on their thermal state. This is achieved by establishing a new structural feature of quantum many-body systems, namely, the strong convexity of their free energy. This property is also present in problems that machine learning techniques can efficiently solve and opens an avenue for applying these methods to problems in quantum physics.

About Mehdi:

Mehdi Soleimanifar is a PhD student in the Center for Theoretical Physics studying quantum information and computation under the supervision of Aram Harrow. Before coming to MIT, he received a BSc in electrical engineering and physics at Sharif University, Tehran, Iran. Mehdi’s scientific interests began to shape in his youth when he spent most of his time chasing stars with telescopes in the dark skies of central Iran and participating in various astronomy related competitions and olympiads. His interests took a turn after entering college, where he learned how computers process information (by majoring in electrical engineering) and how nature behaves quantumly in atomic scales (by majoring in physics). Fascinated by the prospect of merging these interests, he decided to pursue a graduate degree at MIT to better understand the wacky form of information processing allowed by the laws of quantum mechanics.

Neutrinos are surprising particles. Twenty years ago, physicists learned that neutrinos, unexpectedly, have mass. More recent anomalies suggest there could be more types of light neutrinos than currently known. These surprises may point to new physics beyond the Standard Model. To search for answers, a number of experiments are observing the most intense neutrino sources of earth, nuclear reactors. This talk will describe those efforts, what has been learned so far, and what may come in the next few years.

About Dr. Carr:

Rachel Carr is a Pappalardo Fellow in Physics at MIT. The focus of her physics research is neutrinos. She has also worked in public policy as a Stanton Fellow in MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering and as a AAAS Congressional Fellow in the US Senate. She received her PhD from Columbia and BA from the University of Virginia.

Dark matter comprises 85% of the matter in the universe, yet its origin and composition are still unknown. Recently, a new table-top method of searching for dark matter using trapped atoms or ions was proposed. The method probes for a hypothetical dark matter particle that could mediate interactions between neutrons and electrons, leading to small shifts in the transition frequencies of atoms that are identical apart from having different numbers of neutrons, i.e. isotopes. If plotted against each other, these shifts can be used to draw a King plot. King plots will generally show linear relationships between isotope shifts when these shifts are caused solely by Standard Model (SM) effects, but could deviate from linearity in the presence of the hypothesized dark matter boson. We have measured isotope shifts on two transitions of five ytterbium isotopes. The resulting King plot revealed a non-linearity with 3.3σ confidence. However, King non-linearity can also arise from higher order SM nuclear effects - we propose a method to distinguish between these effects, but require higher measurement precision to do so. I will discuss our most recent results in measuring a third transition in ytterbium and further insights this measurement reveals regarding the source of the non-linearity we observe.

About Dr. Craik:

Diana P L Aude Craik is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Fellow in physics working with trapped atomic ions in the Vuletic Group at MIT. The group’s current research involves using precision atomic spectroscopy to search for evidence of new dark matter bosons. Diana completed her undergraduate studies at MIT and her DPhil at the University of Oxford, in the Ion Trap Quantum Computing group. Most of her research so far has been in quantum computation and, more recently, precision measurement with trapped ions, but she has also had the opportunity to work with nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond with the Walsworth Group and the Hu Group at Harvard.