The Zurich Physics Colloquium Podcasts

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View the full archive of The Zurich Physics Colloquium How Much Information is in a Quantum State? People often talk about the quantum state of n entangled particles as if it contained an amount of information exponential in n. Sometimes, they draw the conclusion from this that quantum mechanics must be an extravagant theory valid only for simple systems or small numbers of particles, or that largescale quantum computing must be impossible in principle. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Watching the Dance of the Atoms in Slow-Motion The changes in the atomic configuration underlying chemical reactions, phase transitions and many other fundamental processes in nature take place on a femtosecond (fs) time scale, that is, roughly speaking 10-14 to 10-13 s (1 fs = 10-15s). Ultrafast lasers and optical spectroscopy provide the capability of temporally resolving these processes but they lack the spatial resolution that is be required to directly track the motion of the atoms Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Serving Astrophysics - An Alternative Approach The author of this talk, an astrophysicist by training, had the opportunity, on two occasions, to visit the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) on its Low Earth Orbit as a member of STS-46 and STS-103 Space Shuttle crews. These two visits allowed the execution of essential repair work, mainly in the area of optical performance, electrical power supply, and attitude control of the orbiting observatory. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Two Mysteries of Superconductivity Superconductivity is a most remarkable property of matter, whereby electrons enter spontaneously a state of macroscopic quantum coherence in which electricity flows perfectly. Were this state sustainable at room temperature, our technological world would be profoundly transformed. The most promising materials are the copper oxides which remain superconducting halfway to room temperature Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Precision Quantum Metrology Quantum state engineering of ultracold matter and precise control of optical fields have allowed accurate measurement of light-matter interactions for applications ranging from precision tests of fundamental physics to quantum information science. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Atoms and Molecules in Rydberg states Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Is the 2000 Watt Society Sustainable? Recently a debate has arisen here at ETH Zurich centering on the question whether the envisaged 2000 Watt Society is inevitable. Why should not we be allowed to use more energy? Would not it be more important to limit greenhouse gas emissions? In this lecture, we shall analyze whether the 2000 Watt Society is at all sustainable, and if so, what it will take to keep energy supply at that level after the end of ample and cheap fossil fuels. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Galileos Discovery of a New World in the Heavens and a New Physics on Earth In the autumn of 1609 Galileo pointed his telescope to the heavens and made six important discoveries. First, the Moon has mountains and craters like the Earth, second, there are many more stars than was believed; third, the Milky Way is a congeries of starlets; fourth, Venus has phases and hence goes around the Sun; fifth, Jupiter has four satellites; and sixth there are spots on the Sun. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Solving Gauge and String Theories with Integrable Spin Chains The standard model of particle physics is built upon four-dimensional gauge theories. Unfortunately, computations within them are intrinsically hard, and our knowledge is therefore restricted to tiny fractions of their parameter space. In recent years we have made considerable progress towards solving the spectrum of at least one such theory exactly by employing technology well-known from condensed matter physics such as integrable spin chains. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is a proton-proton collider with a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV. The machine has many novel design features including a twoin- one magnet cooled in superfluid helium at 1.9K. A brief description of the main design features is given and some of the challenges in accelerator physics discussed. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website X-Rays Shines Light on the Mystery of Water Water is the key compound for our existence on this planet and it is involved in many important physical, chemical, biological and geological processes. Although water is the most common molecular substance it is also the most unusual with many anomalies in its thermodynamic properties such as compressibility, density variation and heat capacity. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cavity Optomechanics: Backaction-Cooling of Mechanical Oscillators The mutual coupling of optical and mechanical degrees of freedom via radiation pressure has been a subject of interest in the context of quantum limited displacements measurements for Gravity Wave Detection for many decades. Recent advances in nano- and micro-mechanical oscillators have allowed observing for the first time radiation pressure phenomena in an experimental setting and constitute the emerging research field of Cavity Optomechanics. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cold Dark Matter Searches and the XENON Experiment The XENON experiment aims to detect weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) via their elastic scattering on Xe nuclei, using a low background, two-phase time projection chamber. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website ESO: Present and Future The European Southern Observatory is an intergovernmental organization for astronomy, created in 1962 by Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden and The Netherlands, and today has 14 member states. Headquarters are located in Garching near Munich. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Coupling MEMS to Photons: an new Approach to Macroscopic Quantum Phenomena Radiation pressure provides a coupling between the electromagnetic field and the center-of-mass motion of macroscopic objects. This coupling offers a promising route towards observing quantum phenomena on surprisingly large scales. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Interplanetary Transport Network: Mapping Chaotic Motion Through the Solar System The competing gravitational pull between celestial bodies creates a vast array of passageways that winds around the sun, planets and moons. These corridors are tube-like structures connecting regions of balance in interlinked three body problems. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Quest for the Inner Structure of the Proton Exploring the nature of matter has been of central interest over centuries. In order to study the structure of atoms, protons and neutrons, scattering experiments have become the tool of choice, which have their origin in Rutherfords work in the last century. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Quantum Private Queries Alice wants to ask Bob a question. Bob wants to give Alice the answer. But there's a catch: Alice doesn't want Bob to know what the question is. Classically, the only ways for Alice to make a provably private query are unwieldy. For example, Alice sends Bob a billion questions, of which her original question is one, and has him answer all of them. Quantum mechanically, however, Bob can answer Alice's question and provide her with a guarantee that he doesn't know what her question is. This t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Entangeled Electrons in the Solid State: Quantum Interference and Dephasing I will describe two experiments, where pairs of electrons were entangled in a solid state Mach-Zehnder interferometer, leading to entirely different outcomes. In one experiment a which path detector was entangled with an interferometer, leading to total dephasing of the interference. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Solar Neutrino Spectroscopy with BOREXINO at Gran Sasso The physics program of the Borexino experiment at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory focuses on the measurement of low-energy solar neutrinos. Data taking started in May 2007. With the achieved unprecedented radio-purity of the detector materials, the Borexino collaboration succeeded after only two months of data taking to measure neutrinos in real time which are emitted in the electron capture of 7Be in the core of the Sun. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website