The John Bahcall Colloquium is a monthly lecture series hosted by The Institute for Underground Science at SURF. The series features talks spanning diverse disciplines of underground science and related areas, providing a forum for sharing new results, exchanging ideas, and fostering cross-discipline collaboration.
Topic: From a Few Solar Neutrinos to the Quantum Entanglement of Many Trillions of Neutrinos
For many centuries we were only able to look at the Universe using the light our eyes can see. Gradually scientists uncovered many other messengers of the cosmos, including neutrinos, radio waves, and gravitational waves. This multi-messenger approach was truly revolutionary in astrophysics; a revolution which started underneath the town of Lead with the experiments of Ray Davis, supported by the theoretical work of John Bahcall. Davis was able to catch a small number of neutrinos, but that small number led to fundamental questions about subjects like the nature of the mass, precise details about the evolution of stars, and the possibility of detecting very far sources by high-energy neutrinos which can travel and carry information for very long distances. In the first part of this talk, developments in neutrino physics will be summarized starting with the Davis experiments. The second part will cover how supernovae or mergers of two neutron stars convert gravitational binding energy into 1057 neutrinos. Quantum entanglement of those neutrinos and the possibility of using quantum computing to describe neutrino transport will be discussed.
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Speaker: Dr. A.B. Balantekin, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Balantekin received his Ph.D. from Yale University. After working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is now the Eugene P. Wigner Professor of Physics. Balantekin was selected as a Presidential Young Investigator in 1987. He has received the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Kellett Mid-Career Award, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) Senior Scientist Award and the Distinguished Service Award of the Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) of the American Physical Society (APS). He also received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (together with Daya Bay and PROSPECT Collaborations) and the Hans A. Bethe Prize of the APS.
Balantekin served as the Chair of the DNP and on the Executive Board of the APS. He served as the editor of Journal of Physics G, Physical Review C, and Physics Letters B. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics of the United Kingdom as well as a member of the Turkish Science Academy.
You can register for this talk here.