Upcoming Evenings

The Buildings Blocks of the Universe

The Shape of Things to Come - The dawn of the age of quantum matter.

Date: TBD

Coming Soon!

Date: TBD

Date: 21 August

Thanks to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland physicists now have a more complete understanding of the universe than ever before. But what comes next? Dr. Andeen will explain our current theory of the building blocks that make up our universe. He will describe why the Higgs boson is so important and how we build the enormous experiments that observe these ephemeral particles. Then he’ll discuss the search for exotic new particles. Discovering these minuscule motes of matter could have a tremendous impact on our understanding of the universe as a whole: unraveling the secrets of dark matter, dark energy, the origin of the universe and the nature of gravity.

From renewable energy and water security to fault-tolerant quantum computers, a novel class of newly discovered materials is rapidly reshaping the world as we know it. Just as bronze and iron precipitated the spread of ancient civilisations, the twentieth century saw the dawn of the silicon age and with it, the single greatest surge in information technology since the printing press. There’s good reason that the epicentre of global technology is dubbed Silicon Valley. And while silicon-based semiconductor technology still hurtles forward at break-neck speeds, we are just as rapidly approaching a saturation of the electronic capabilities of pure silicon. When we get there, like its predecessors, this age too will end. Indeed, as we continue to push the boundaries of size, environmental impact and speed a new age, defined by a new class of material, called topological quantum matter, whose electronic properties are governed by the Dirac equation that is both fundamentally quantum mechanical and essentially relativistic is emerging as the wonder material of the future. In this talk I will discuss the role played by topology - the mathematical study of shapes - in understanding the properties of topological quantum matter.