Hosted by: 'Sanjaya Senanayake'

The primary goal of Earth System Models is to improve understanding and projection of global change which is driven principally by the elevation of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration resulting from the use of fossil energy. Many of the observed and projected impacts of global change portend increasing environmental and economic risk, yet the uncertainty surrounding the projection of our future climate remains unacceptably high. Although annual carbon dioxide emissions associated with anthropogenic activity are notable, they are a fraction of the size of the carbon fluxes associated with the global carbon cycle. Terrestrial photosynthesis (gross primary productivity) is the largest of these carbon fluxes and is the gatekeeper process for the uncertain subsidy of fossil fuel use provided by the terrestrial carbon sink. Therefore, increasing confidence in model representation of photosynthesis - particularly the response of photosynthesis to rising carbon dioxide concentration and temperature - is an essential part of reducing uncertainty in projections of global change. Focusing on leaf level physiology, I will discuss the how parametric and structural representation of photosynthesis impacts model responses to key environmental drivers and show how data from recent field work in the Arctic and the tropics is aiming to inform model parameterization and representation of photosynthesis in next generation models.

Hosted by: 'T. Sampieri'

Play group will sometimes schedule different types of play dates at various venues. To see the schedule and join, please use https://www.facebook.com/groups/241354149387588/#!/groups/241354149387588/ and open 'BNL Spouses and Kids' and sign in. You do need an established Facebook account in order to do so.

Hosted by: ''Amarjit Soni''

Hosted by: ''Kathy Schwager''

Hosted by: ''Kathy Schwager''

Hosted by: 'Enrico Rinaldi'

"There is long-standing theoretical interest in the behavior of a strongly-coupled gauge theory in the presence of multiple fermions charged under different representations of the gauge group. In addition to the question of whether generation of dynamically separated scales will occur, such theories appear commonly in UV realizations of composite Higgs models with partially composite top quarks. I will present a first lattice study of SU(4) gauge theory with fermions in each of the two lowest-lying representations, discussing the finite-temperature phase structure and low-lying spectrum. Connections to BSM physics through a particular composite Higgs model will also be made."

Hosted by: 'Robert Konik'

The development of pump-probe spectroscopies with femtosecond time resolution, which allows to track the dynamics of electronic degrees of freedom in solids under optical excitations, opens up a new window to understand strongly correlated materials and offers the intriguing possibility of controlling their properties with light, on ultra-fast time scales. Triggered by these advances, the interest around time dependent phenomena in quantum many body systems has recently substantially grown. In this talk will review recent progress in understanding transient dynamics of electrons in correlated metals, Mott Insulators and superconductors. I will show that quite generically these systems display very sharp dynamical transitions as a function of the external perturbation, in correspondence of which the lattice response and the sensitivity to density inhomogeneities can be greatly enhanced.

The PiXeL detector (PXL) of the STAR experiment at RHIC is the first application of the state-of-the-art thin Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) technology in a collider environment. Designed to extend the STAR measurement capabilities in the heavy flavor domain, it took data in Au+Au collisions, p+p and p+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=$200 GeV at RHIC, during the period 2014-2016. The PXL detector is based on 50 μm-thin MAPS sensors with a pitch of 20.7 μm. Each sensor includes an array of nearly 1 million pixels, read out in rolling shutter mode in 185.6 μs. The 170 mW/cm2 power dissipation allows for air cooling and contributes to reduce the global material budget to 0.4% radiation length on the innermost layer. Detector performance and lessons learned from construction and operations will be presented in this talk. Following the successful experience in STAR, the next-generation MAPS sensor will be used to upgrade the ALICE Inner Tracking System (ITS) at LHC. Compared to the STAR PXL detector, the integration time for the future ALICE ITS Upgrade has been reduced by more than a factor of 10, and down to

Hosted by: 'Xin Qian'

Searches for muon and electron number violation in the charged sector continue to be a sensitive probe of non Standard Model physics. I will give results of the full data-set of the MEG collaboration's search for muons decaying to electron plus photon and describe improvements to the MEG muon beam and apparatus that will improve sensitivity by a factor of ten in the next few years. I will also briefly review other experiments in the planning and early construction phases that are expected to improve sensitivity in related processes in the coming 5-10 years.

Hosted by: 'Frank Alexander'

Anticipated advances in high-performance computing are enabling exciting new areas of computational and data oriented cancer research. These frontiers are being explored in a unique collaboration between the US Department of Energy and the National Cancer Institute in the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer. While the three-year collaboration is still in its first year, the collaboration is providing tremendous insight into the promise and challenges of employing extreme scale computing to advance research in the challenging and complex problem of cancer. Challenged with the aim of providing predictive insight in areas such as tumor response to treatments, molecular level interactions, and even clinical outcomes, the collaborative effort advances the frontiers of cancer research and computing in both numerically-intensive and data-intensive applications, while providing insights into opportunities for the high-performance computing community overall.

Hosted by: ''Dr. Qun Liu''

Programmed cell death (PCD) is a common cellular pathway induced in plants upon abiotic and biotic stresses. The ability to modulate this process in crop plants can potentially improve resilience of agriculture productivity to drastic shifts in climate patterns. Over the past 2 decades, my lab has worked to characterize the function and activities for two classes of highly conserved cell death regulators in plants: the ER-resident Bax Inhibitor-1 (BI1) ortholog and the metacaspase protease family in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. With a combination of genetic and molecular approaches, we demonstrate that AtBI1 is a molecular rheostat that regulates cellular sensitivity to stresses in the ER to gate the threshold for PCD activation. Remarkably, overexpression of AtBI1 in the energy grass sugarcane, a C4 crop plant, resulted in transgenic plants that have significantly improved tolerance to water stress. In parallel to studies with this negative regulator of PCD, my group has also carried out studies to elucidate the function and control mechanisms for type II metacaspases from Arabidopsis that may work as positive switches for PCD activation. Two prototypical members of this subtype, AtMC4 and AtMC9, are highly conserved in plants and have distinct biochemical and regulatory properties. Using a domain-swap approach, recent work in our lab has revealed new information on the structure-function relationships for these proteases and generated variants with novel biochemical properties that may help to clarify their roles and function in vivo.

Hosted by: 'Ben Ocko and Shirish Chodankar'

Hosted by: 'Christoph Lehner'

Hosted by: 'Heikki Mantysaari'

Multi-particle correlations observed in small collision systems at top LHC energies exhibit signatures which are similar to those observed in large collision systems and generally attributed to the formation of a deconfined quark-gluon plasma (QGP). This suggests that even proton-proton and proton-lead collisions may produce small droplets of QGP which translate spatial inhomogeneities into final-state momentum anisotropies. A primary challenge in testing hydrodynamic descriptions of small collision systems is in modeling the initial stages of the collision. In this talk, I discuss recent efforts to apply Bayesian methodology to parametric descriptions of initial state physics. I show that such methods can be extended to smaller length scales which include partonic degrees of freedom and glean information regarding the fluctuating nature of the proton.

Hosted by: 'Kerstin Kleese van Dam'

With the advent of exascale computing the field of computational chemistry is on the verge of entering a new era of modeling. Large computing resources can enable researchers to tackle scientific problems that are larger and more realistic than ever before, and to include more of the complex dynamical behavior of nature. However, the future exascale architectures will be significantly different and require advances in algorithms and new programming paradigms. We will discuss some of the work on developing scalable algorithms for strongly correlated systems, simulations of complexes in dynamical environments, and complex spectra. Significant improvements will be reported in our development efforts of a full threaded plane wave ab initio molecular dynamics code in NWChem on Intel Phi platforms. Finally, we will demonstrate advances in the parallel communication layer Global Arrays utlizing LBNL's GasNET and barrier elision techniques. Bio: Bert de Jong leads the Computational Chemistry, Materials, and Climate Group at LBNL. He has a background in general chemistry, chemical engineering and high performance computational chemistry, with specialization and strong capabilities in modeling heavy element chemistry. He is a main developer of the NWChem software at the EMSL, one of four developers of the unique fully relativistic software MOLFDIR for quantum chemistry. Prior to joining Berkeley Lab, de Jong was at PNNL, where he lead the High Performance Software Development Group responsible for NWChem. He has published 89 journal papers, 14 conference papers and 7 book chapters and has given over 65 invited presentations and lectures at international conferences and universities.De Jong earned his doctorate in theoretical chemistry in 1998 from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He was a postdoctoral fellow at PNNL before transitioning to a staff member in 2000.

Hosted by: 'Oleg Gang'

Growth and self-assembly processes sometimes result, on laboratory timescales, in structures that are in thermal equilibrium, and sometimes result in structures that are "trapped" out of equilibrium. I will discuss examples of each. DNA "bricks" are nanometer-scale particles that self-assemble into equilibrium structures of about 1000 particles in size. Each particle in these structures is of a distinct type and has a defined spatial location. I will discuss the constraints that inter-particle interactions must satisfy in order to produce such equilibrium structures in high yield. I will also discuss the case of a two-component mixture of particles that can self-assemble into a nonequilibrium structure in which component types are intermingled in a manner similar to spins in a ferromagnet at a (static) critical point. I will argue that such "critical soft matter" could be self-assembled from DNA-coated colloids, and would have new and useful properties.

Hosted by: 'T. Sampieri'

Hosted by: 'Chang-Yong Nam'

In the last decade, organic electronics has promised a seemingly bright future for flexible and large area electronics. However, functional organic transistors are not realized yet due to the low carrier mobilities and downscaling issue of the organic layers. Vertical organic transistors are a viable solution to overcome these challenges because the short vertical channel can drive large output currents at low powers. In this presentation, two types of vertical organic transistors will be introduced: 1) permeable metal-base transistors (PMBTs) where a permeable metal-base is sandwiched by two semiconductor layers and 2) vertical organic Schottky barrier transistors (VOSBTs) where an organic Schottky barrier is modulated by the underlying gate electric field. In both types of transistors, a nano-porous electrode play a key role for the output current modulation. Understanding the effects of the pore size and density in the porous electrode on the modulation behavior enables the development of high gain PMBTs or VOSBTs with large current on/off ratio. A key advantage of the vertical device architecture is its direct integration with functional layers for novel sensor applications. By inserting optoelectronic, ferroelectric, or piezoelectric layers into the gate insulator of the VOSBT, a high efficiency infrared photodetector (optoelectronic VOSBT), flexible non-volatile memory (ferroelectric VOSBT), or a novel ultrasonic sensor (piezoelectric VOSBT) could be developed respectively. Further insertion of an organic light-emitting diode into the channel layer of the VOSBT resulted in novel light-emitting sensors such as infrared-to-visible up-conversion devices or ultrasonic-gated OLEDs that may enable pixel-less infrared or acoustic imaging in the future.

Come meet the FY2017 BWIS Executive Board to voice your concerns, learn about our future events and volunteer opportunities. We hope to see you there and bring a friend! Brookhaven Women in Science is a diverse community that promotes equal opportunity and advancement for all women in support of world-class science. BWIS is a volunteer-run non-profit funded by BSA and membership fees. If you have any questions, please email agoldberg@bnl.gov.

Hosted by: ''Fang Lu''

Owing to advances in multilayer Laue lens (MLL) fabrication and the development of a high-stiffness and high-precision instrument, MLL-based microscope has matured for real scientific applications and has become available for user operation at the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe beamline (HXN) of National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) with 15-nm spatial resolution. In addition to high resolution, a suite of techniques that employs various contrast mechanisms to simultaneously image elemental, structural and chemical variations on the nanoscale has been developed, enabling imaging capabilities that are not previously available. In this presentation, I'll focus on the development of multimodality imaging capability at the HXN. I'll show that by collecting fluorescence and far-field diffraction data together, absorption-, phase- and fluorescence-contrast images can be taken simultaneously, yielding additional information that any one of them alone cannot provide. Software packages have been developed to streamline the analysis in 2D and 3D cases. I'll present a few case studies to demonstrate how multimodality imaging can help understand the science. I'll also show the development of Bragg Ptychography technique, which allows the reconstruction of the strain field in crystalline samples with very high spatial resolution. The combination of high spatial resolution and multimodality imaging with hard x-rays creates a unique microscopy tool for material studies on the nanoscale and opens up a lot of exciting research opportunities in many areas of science.

Hosted by: 'Janek Uin'

Aerosols and their climate forcing represent one of the largest uncertainties in global climate models (GCMs) today. Despite being tiny in size (~1nm - ~10 µm in diameter), ambient aerosols have large impacts through their microphysical interactions and climate feedbacks. For these reasons, direct in situ measurement of aerosol chemical, physical and morphological properties is a high priority to reduce these uncertainties. Absorbing aerosols that absorb light and contribute to atmospheric warming are of particular interest due to their anthropogenic sources, potential to increase in the future due to climate change, and impacts on human health. Large uncertainties exist on the extent of the warming that absorbing aerosols cause, specifically due to morphology and mixing state as black carbon physical and optical properties change as particles are transported in the atmosphere due to oxidation, coagulation, and condensation. For this reason, black carbon and organic carbon aerosol species that are emitted from combustion sources such as biomass burning and diesel sources will be presented. Emission ratios, physical and optical properties will be compared to those from controlled laboratory studies to understand carbonaceous aerosols and their transformations in the atmosphere. Laboratory measurements are used as a framework to understand the ambient observations and to improve model treatment of aerosols and aging in global climate models.

Hosted by: ''''Oleg Gang''''

The creation of colloidal machines – that is, dynamic assemblies of colloidal components that perform useful functions – requires advances in our ability to rationally engineer the dynamics of active colloids operating outside of thermodynamic equilibrium. Owing to their small size (nanometers to microns), such machines must assemble spontaneously and operate autonomously in response to simple energy inputs due to chemical fuels or external fields. Achieving non-trivial dynamical behaviors and ultimately function demands the use of complex components, into which the desired behaviors can be effectively encoded. The challenge is conceptually similar to that of programmable self-assembly, whereby assembly information encoded in the building blocks directs their organization into a specific structure. Extending this approach to design colloidal machines will require control over particle organization in time as well as space – that is, over dynamics as well as structure. This talk will present recent work from our group on strategies for powering active colloidal systems and for programming these systems to perform increasingly complex tasks. By directing colloidal matter outside of equilibrium, we aim to create new materials and technologies with capabilities that rival those of living organisms.

Hosted by: 'Frank Alexander'

In business analytics, operations research, engineering design, and other predictive sciences, a critical step in building models of reality and making predictions is solving an optimization problem. Linear and quadratic optimizers and penalties are a mainstay of data science, and have been popular due to their ability to handle large numbers of dimensions quickly. However, the use of linear and/or quadratic tools can seriously limit the amount and quality of information that can be applied in the inverse problem. One could argue that most real-world problems are probabilistic, high-dimensional, and nonlinear with nonlinear constraints — thus linear and quadratic tools may not actually be a good choice. Too often, we are forced to solve reduced-dimensional problems that may no longer adequately represent reality, but instead fit within the resource and design limitations of the selected optimizer. These limitations become much more pronounced when attempting to predict structure-property relationships in materials, as problems typically require significant computational resources, are nonlinear, and are often governed by rare-events. This talk will introduce some tools within the `mystic' framework for efficiently solving high-dimensional non-convex optimization problems with nonlinear constraints. We will, in the context of materials discovery, also discuss how `mystic', with the OUQ algorithm, can be used for rigorous model validation, certification, and the design of experiments.

Hosted by: ''Hiromichi Nishimura''

Hosted by: 'Matthew Sfeir'

Analogues to thin-film solar photovoltaics (PV), a typical solar-fuel device consists of a hybrid inorganic-polymer composite that directly converts solar energy into H2 or liquid fuels, with inputs of sunlight, water and CO2 only. Once abundant and low-cost solar H2 is produced as a universal energy carrier, we can use it to convert synthetic or bio-fuels, upgrade petrochemical feedstock, improve combustion and produce ammonia. However, achieving such an efficient and flexible solar-fuel membrane is not trivial, particularly due to the instability of efficient semiconductor/liquid interfaces. In this talk, I will first discuss several key advances of protective coatings as a stabilization strategy. All technologically important semiconductors so far like Si and GaAs photocorrode. Although protective coatings are not prevalent in solid-state research, they are essential in the field of photoelectrochemistry. With protective coating strategies, a 10% efficient water-splitting prototype has been demonstrated. With modeling-inspired materials design, I will show a viable pathway beyond 20% efficiencies. Finally, I will discuss needs for basic research on photocatalytic processes at solid/liquid interfaces. Operando synchrotron x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy presents vast opportunities for understanding energetics of solid/liquid interfaces and for further controlling their photocatalytic processes. Understanding the change-transfer rate picture of solid/liquid interfaces promise cost-effective particle-based photocatalyst devices.

Hosted by: ''TBD''

Hosted by: 'Nora Sundin'

Hosted by: 'Ben Ocko and Shirish Chodankar'

Hosted by: 'Ivan Bozovic'

Guided by theory, unparalleled properties—those of hidden ground states—are being unleashed by exploiting large strains in concert with the ability to precisely control dimensionality and stabilize metastable phases in epitaxial oxide heterostructures. For example, materials that are not ferroelectric or ferromagnetic in their unstrained state can be transmuted into materials that are both at the same time. Similarly, new tunable dielectrics with unparalleled performance have been created as well as a new single-phase multiferroic material where ferroelectricity and strong magnetic ordering are coupled near room-temperature. These are just three examples of the unparalleled properties—those of hidden ground states—being unleashed in epitaxial oxide heterostructures utilizing thin film alchemy

Hosted by: 'T. Sampieri'

Hosted by: 'Andrei Nomerotski'

Dark matter makes up 85% of the matter in our Universe, but we have yet to learn its identity. A broad array of search strategies are needed to probe for non-gravitational interactions between dark matter and ordinary matter. While most searches focus on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) with masses between 1 GeV and 1 TeV, it is imperative to also consider other motivated dark matter candidates. In this talk, I will discuss dark matter with MeV-to-GeV masses, which is a theoretically and phenomenologically appealing possibility and presents a new frontier in the search for dark matter. I will highlight novel dark matter direct-detection strategies that can probe this under-explored mass range. I will describe how XENON10 data already probes dark matter with masses as low as a few MeV, and discuss improvements expected from new experiments using semiconductors or scintillators. This includes SENSEI, a new ultra-low-threshold silicon CCD detector, which is poised to probe vast new regions of parameter space in the next few years. I will also present a few simple benchmark models of MeV-to-GeV dark matter, and contrast direct-detection probes with searches at colliders and fixed-target experiments.

Play group will sometimes schedule different types of play dates at various venues. To see the schedule and join, please use https://www.facebook.com/groups/241354149387588/#!/groups/241354149387588/ and open 'BNL Spouses and Kids' and sign in. You do need an established Facebook account in order to do so.

Hosted by: ''Pier Paolo Giardino''

Hosted by: '''Kerstin Kleese van Dam'''

ATLAS is one of two general-purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The interactions in the ATLAS detectors create an enormous flow of data. Many more derived data products and complimentary simulation data are also produced by the collaboration, representing more than 3000 scientists from 174 institutes in 38 countries. In total, 250PB are currently stored in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid by ATLAS. In this talk, we will discuss the challenges of managing such a huge amount of data and share our experience acquired in designing, running and maintaining such a large system. We will also present the challenges ahead and future developments.

Hosted by: 'Feng Wang'

Stationary electric energy storage has been considered as one of the most attractive systems, which are crucial to stimulate the growth of renewable energy resources and to improve the reliability of electric power grids. Under the support from U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, PNNL Stationary Energy Storage group has been primary focusing on practical large scale batteries, which are important parts of Advanced Grid Research & Development. In this presentation, an overview of those activities will be briefly summarized. Of the particular interest is sodium-metal halide (Na-MH) battery, which has gained increasing interest as a large-scale energy storage device owing to several advantages such as abundant resource, high voltage, long cycle life, safe cell failure mode, and ease of assembly in discharged state. Researches at PNNL have been focused on developing advanced Na-MH battery technologies by lowering the operating temperature less than 200°C and developing low cost cathode materials. Another attractive path to increase energy storage capacities, lower the material costs, and improving operation safety involves the use of multi-valent elements. Key benefits of multi-valent systems over mono-valent (i.e. Li) include increased electrons available per molecule which increases energy density. Mg metal anodes are particularly interesting, as Mg platting can be completed without forming dendritic structures, which are common for Li metal anode. However, numerous scientific and technical hurdles still need to be overcome before integrating Mg anode to practical rechargeable batteries. This talk will present rational synthesis methods and characterizations for novel Mg electrolytes as well as application in full cell studies.

Hosted by: ''Hiromichi Nishimura''

This talk has three parts: 1. I discuss the phenomenon of understanding – our ordinary experience of understanding the objects and events in our environment. Normally we do not pay attention to the understanding process itself, but just to what is understood (e.g. I understand the ordinary things you say, but do not enquire how it is that I understand them); here we focus upon the process. I argue that understanding holds an important key to the nature of human cognition—our ability to think and reason. 2. Next I examine the process of self-organization – the process whereby a type of general order arises from local interactions between parts of an originally chaotic system. Self-organization is so-called because the order is not controlled by any agent external to the system. Many familiar phenomena are self-organized, from rush-hour traffic patterns to ant hills, as well as many organic processes within our bodies. 3. Finally, I attempt to show that understanding is a self-organizing process. In considering cognitive functions in the brain, I take a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach. A top-down approach starts with a general system, in this case our conscious awareness of understanding, and breaks it down into (sometimes unconscious) subsystems. I argue that the sort of understanding we are familiar with is possible only through the self-organized subsystems of our ordinary understanding of our situation and environment.

Hosted by: 'Xin Qian'

The PICO Collaboration builds bubble chambers for the direct detection of WIMP dark matter. These devices are unique among direct detection experiments both in the WIMP models they can probe and the backgrounds they face. The PICO collaboration has set consecutive world-leading direct-detection limits on the spin-dependent WIMP-proton cross section, most recently with a zero-background 1.2 ton-day exposure with a C3F8 target in the PICO-60 detector at SNOLAB. This result is significant not just because it reaches new WIMP parameter space, but also because it demonstrates our ability to eliminate the anomalous bubble nucleation background that limited past bubble chamber WIMP searches, opening the door for experiments at the ton scale and beyond. I will describe this new result from PICO, our immediate plans for new detectors at SNOLAB, and the broader role bubble chambers will play in the future of dark matter detection, including the new scintillating bubble chamber technology developed by my group at Northwestern.

Hosted by: 'Kerstin Kleese van Dam'

This presentation analyses the essence of DataFlow SuperComputing, defines its advantages and sheds light on the related programming model. DataFlow computers, compared to ControlFlow computers, offer speedups of 10 to 100 (even 1000 for some applications), power reductions of about 10, and size reductions of also about 10. However, the programming paradigm is different, and has to be mastered. The talk explains the paradigm, using Maxeler as an example, and sheds light on the ongoing research in the field. Examples include Computational Physics and Computational Chemistry, Cryptography and Security, CreditDerivatives and Banking Analytics, GeoPhysics, WeatherForecast, SignalProcessing, OilGas, DataEngineering, DataMining, Medicine, Genomics, SmartGrid, WaterResearch, etc. Also, a recent study from Tsinghua University in China is presented, which reveals that, for Shallow Water Weather Forecast (a BigData problem), on the 1U level, the Maxeler DataFlow machine is 14 times faster than the Tianhe machine, rated #1 on the Top 500 list (based on Linpack, which is a smalldata benchmark). Given enough time, the presentation also gives a tutorial about the programming in space, which is the programming paradigm used for the Maxeler dataflow machines (established in 2014 by Stanford, Imperial, Tsinghua, and the University of Tokyo). The presentation concludes with selected examples and a tool overview (appgallery.maxeler.com and webIDE.maxeler.com). A detailed tutorial on programming in space will be available after the presentation. Related hands-on activities will be performed by remote login (maxeler.mi.sanu.ac.rs). Since December 2016, Maxeler is also available via Amazon AWS. In December 2016, Hitachi of Japan announced its partnership with Maxeler (also available via Amazon AWS), stating that, for their finance and cryptography applications, Maxeler is orders of magnitude faster than any other ControlFlow platform (i.e., CPU or GPU).

Hosted by: 'Research Library'

Hosted by: 'Jin Huang'

The standard picture of heavy ion collisions is that large systems (collisions of large nuclei like Au+Au and Pb+Pb) create a quark-gluon plasma that exhibits collective behavior indicative of nearly inviscid hydrodynamical evolution. Recently, data from small systems (collisions of a small projectile and a large target like d+Au and p+Pb) have been found to exhibit strikingly similar evidence for collective behavior. To further elucidate these results, RHIC delivered in 2016 a beam energy scan of d+Au collisions at 4 different energies: 200, 62.4, 39, and 19.6 GeV. In this talk we present a wide array of results from the Run16 d+Au BES and discuss the implications for collective behavior and the limits of applicability for hydrodynamics.

Hosted by: 'T. Sampieri'

Play group will sometimes schedule different types of play dates at various venues. To see the schedule and join, please use https://www.facebook.com/groups/241354149387588/#!/groups/241354149387588/ and open 'BNL Spouses and Kids' and sign in. You do need an established Facebook account in order to do so.

Solo works by Rameau and Liszt bracket seldom-heard masterpieces by Bortkiewicz and Volkmann in a recital by this internationally renowned performer.

The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) study is an international collaboration working on a concept for a machine to collide electrons and antielectrons at energies up to 3 TeV. By using fundamental particles like electrons/antielectrons (rather than protons as in the Large Hadron Collider), and unique combination of experimental precision and high energy, the particle physics community would gain a different perspective on the laws of nature. The ongoing development of the CLIC detector to record the collisions is mainly driven by precision physics under challenging beam and background conditions, which lead to a number of cutting-edge R&D activities. This seminar will cover one of these activities, specifically the second generation of a silicon hybrid pixel readout chip, named CLICpix2, conceived for the vertex detector. This application-specific integrated circuit was designed in a 65 nm CMOS technology with a remarkable pixel pitch of 25 µm, including an in-pixel analog frontend as well as a digital backend, which allow simultaneous time (8-bit time of arrival) and energy (5-bit time over threshold) measurements. The readout chip also features selectable data compression and power pulsing, enabling an average power dissipation below 50 mW/cm^2. The in-pixel and in-periphery analog circuitry will be covered in depth, highlighting the main challenges faced during the design, which include small area, low noise, and low power. The in-pixel digital backend, digital readout, and digital slow control will be covered as well, but quickly. The preliminary measured results will be presented, and compared to simulated ones.

Hosted by: 'Hiromichi Nishimura'

Symmetry and topology are powerful tools to study strongly interacting dynamics. In this talk, we will see that mixed 't Hooft anomaly and global consistency strongly constrains the possible low-energy dynamics in a simple quantum mechanical example. I will briefly explain the same idea is useful to study the phase diagram of bifundamental gauge theories at finite theta angles.

Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) play a crucial role in the interface between physical signals found in Nature (analog domain) and abstract bits used in digital systems (digital domain). In this seminar, firstly, after a short introduction to ADC basics, a first-order incremental delta-sigma ADC with 10-bit, ~ 100 S/s, and 11 µW designed in a 0.6 µm CMOS technology will be presented. This ADC architecture is suitable for DC-like measurements, and despite its noise shaping nature, it preserves a one-to-one mapping between the sampled analog input and the digital output. We will then move to a two-channel time-interleaved pipeline ADC with 8-bit, 120 MS/s, 14 mW, and 530x230 µm^2 fabricated in a 130 nm CMOS technology. This ADC architecture is based on a very interesting principle known in the literature as "MOS parametric amplification," and is suitable for high speed data conversion, e.g. in communication, IF sampling, etc. Following these two past personal developments, the present state-of-the-art summary on ADCs will be presented, emphasizing the recent trend toward hybrid ADCs, which blends different architectures into one ADC design enabling new breakthroughs in accuracy, speed, power efficiency, and area, particularly in advanced (< 65 nm) technology nodes.

Hosted by: 'Alessandro Tricoli'

During the second run in 2015-2016, LHC delivered the number of proton-proton collisions far beyond expectation and at higher energy than in run I. We will review the very first results on the H boson properties based on the full dataset collected by CMS by now. We will go through the four main topics: H boson couplings to gauge bosons, couplings to fermions, self-couplings, and search for an extended Higgs sector. Prospects of some of these measurements through the end of run III and phase II of LHC will be discussed.

Hosted by: 'Alex Harris'

Low temperature fuel cells are electrochemical devices that convert chemical energy directly to electricity. They have great potential for both stationary and transportation applications and are expected to help address the energy and environmental problems that have become prevalent in our society. Despite their great promise, commercialization has been hindered by lower than predicted efficiencies and high loading of Pt-based electrocatalysts in the electrodes. For more than five decades, extensive work has being focused on the development of novel electrocatalysts for fuel cell reactions. In this talk, I will present recent progress in developing advanced electrocatalysts mainly for oxygen reduction reaction in my group, with an emphasis on core-shell and shape controlled nanocrystals. Fuel cell testing results on these advanced catalysts will be shared. The mechanisms for activity enhancement will also be discussed based on the results of density functional theory calculations.