Stoney's British Pub
3007 Concord Pike
Wilmington, DE
7:30pm
Neil MacFarlaneUniversity of Pennsylvania
“Communicating using Light at the Nanoscale”
Since the 1960s light has been used to encode and transmit information through fiber optic technology. In the same way that miniaturization of electronic chips has allowed for increases in processing power and decreases in power consumption, the field of integrated photonics has similarly revolutionized optical systems. Integrated photonics is a field that dates back to the 1980s and focuses on the design and fabrication of chip scale optical systems consisting of many components with critical dimensions at the nanometer scale. In this talk, I will first introduce the field of integrated photonics, some fundamental components, and explain how we can confine, control, and process light on integrated photonic chips. Finally, I will talk about how integrated photonic chips are used in modern communication systems.
Stoney's British Pub
3007 Concord Pike
Wilmington, DE
7:30pm
John CrockerUniversity of Pennsylvania
“How is the Grand Canyon Like Mayonnaise?”
Mundane materials like soap suds and mayonnaise have long defied physical explanation. Their microscopic bubbles and droplets move in a complex, seemingly random manner whose physical origin remains mysterious. Work at Penn over the last several years has solved the mystery, showing that the unusual motion is driven by the foam’s energy function or landscape having an unexpectedly tortuous, even fractal structure that resembles a branching river valley like the Grand Canyon. The resulting theory has been confirmed by experiments on a synthetic ‘clear’ mayonnaise, and has implications for understanding diverse systems ranging from Artificial Intelligence to the cytoskeleton of living cells.
Stoney's British Pub
3007 Concord Pike
Wilmington, DE
7:30pm
Marc MiskinUniversity of Pennsylvania
“Building the World's Smallest Robot”
Nature routinely makes smart, complex, yet microscopically tiny machines: cells. But how can humans do it for ourselves? And can we do it in a way that is easy to design and understand? After making microelectronics at smaller and smaller sizes, some of the pieces to address this puzzle are falling into place. Today, it’s possible to pack nearly 1 million circuit components in the space of a paramecium, enabling tiny systems for sensing, communication, and computation. This radical miniaturization of electronics has brought with it the incredible opportunity to reimagine life in the microworld: put together the right way, these parts could be used to build robotic creatures too small to be seen by the naked eye. My group tries to realize this vision. Currently, we hold the Guinness world record for tiniest robot: a smart, programmable machine ten times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. This talk is about how that machine came to life and what these tiny machines do, both in the lab and in applications.
Stoney's British Pub
3007 Concord Pike
Wilmington, DE
7:28pm
Eleni KatiforiUniversity of Pennsylvania
“The Secret Lives of Networks”
It is impossible to create a large-scale organism without some kind of distribution network that nourishes it. These networks, as the arteries, veins, and lymphatics in humans or the xylem and phloem in plants, are pervasive, much like the road systems in cities. However, unlike conventional road systems, vascular networks possess the remarkable ability to dynamically self-organize, altering the flow direction as necessary and mending themselves, all without relying on a central coordinator. In this talk, I will delve into the physics underlying these phenomena, exploring the many intricate adaptations that make vascular networks so successful at their jobs.
Stoney's British Pub
3007 Concord Pike
Wilmington, DE
7:30pm
Matthew GoodUniversity of Pennsylvania
“Augmented Bio-Reality: Genetically-Encoded Materials to Engineer Cells and Tissues”
To construct a house, an architect creates a blueprint and contractors follow instructions to assemble building blocks into a final design. However, at the micro scale, biological systems form structures in a different fashion – they create order from disorder via a process of self-assembly or self-organization. I will discuss efforts from our interdisciplinary research group at Penn to understand how cells build organelles via a process called condensation, and how cell collectives can be understood as bicontinuous materials. The significance of this research extends broadly from designing liquid crystals used in TV displays to understanding and controlling the shapes of living tissues. Our ability to design and build living materials has important applications in sustainability and for the future of regenerative medicine.
Stoney's British Pub
3007 Concord Pike
Wilmington, DE
7:30pm
Struan F.A. GrantPerelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
“Snooze or Lose: The Impact of Genetics on Sleep Health”
Genome wide surveys in humans have identified genetic signals robustly associated with insomnia and other sleep-related traits, yet little is known about the functional roles of the underlying causal variants in regulating sleep duration or quality. Using a 3D Genomics approach, we identified a number of genes that regulate sleep. Our results provide the first physical variant-to-gene mapping of human sleep genes followed by model organism-based prioritization, revealing novel and conserved processes in sleep regulation.
Stoney's British Pub
3007 Concord Pike
Wilmington, DE
7:30pm
Ritesh AgarwalUniversity of Pennsylvania
“How Can Ideas from Tornadoes & Whirlpools Improve Our Internet?”
Our insatiable appetite for receiving, sending, and processing data has led to an explosion in the data handling capacity of our information technology (IT) infrastructure. However, with currently close to 20 billion connected devices, which will only increase as we go forward, along with increasingly large amounts of data that are processed, puts severe limitations on our IT networks. If these networks cannot handle the exponential increase in data packets that are moved at any instant, a severe information crisis will occur. IT networks use light to encode, transmit and receive information and utilize many devices such as lasers, modulators, fiber optical cables and photodetectors. Currently, these systems are mostly based on the wavelength division multiplexing concept but there is a limitation on the spectrum available for information channels. Therefore, IT systems are facing difficulties to scale up their capabilities with the growing requirements hence requiring revolutionary breakthroughs in technology. The light beams that are used for carrying data have many more capabilities than those that have been exploited. One such degree of freedom is what are called the vortex modes of light akin to what we observe in tornadoes and whirlpools. These vortex modes of light can be trained to encode, transmit and process information in addition to wavelength division multiplexing to significantly boost the information carrying capacity of networks. However, this is not an easy task and requires many breakthroughs in science and technology of optical materials and devices. In this talk, I will discuss some of the recent progress and challenges in creating and studying materials and devices that can produce, transmit and detect the different vortex modes of light that are promising for developing the next generation of IT infrastructure.
Stoney's British Pub
3007 Concord Pike
Wilmington, DE
7:30pm
Phil NelsonUniversity of Pennsylvania
“Why Are There So Many Songs About Rainbows?”
Rainbows have a deep hold on the human imagination. Everyone throughout classical antiquity had ideas about rainbows, but no real progress got made until René Descartes; even thereafter, rainbows spurred breakthroughs in physics and math, all the while teasing us with their beauty. For example, the photo shows some extra structure, plainly visible yet never depicted by artists, that clobbered Isaac Newton’s theory of light. Let’s see where rainbows can lead us today.