Science and the technologies it has spawned have been the principal drivers of the American economy since the end of World War II. Today, economists estimate that a whopping 85 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) growth traces its origin to science and technology. The size of the impact should not be a surprise, considering the ubiquity of modern technologies.

Innovation has brought us the consumer products we take for granted: smart phones and tablets, CD and DVD players, cars that are loaded with electronics and GPS navigating tools and that rarely break down, search engines like Google and Yahoo, the Internet and the Web, money-saving LED lights, microwave ovens and much more. Technology has also made our military stronger and kept our nation safer. It has made food more affordable and plentiful. It has provided medical diagnostic tools, such as MRIs, CT scanners and genomic tests; treatments for disease and illness, such as antibiotics, chemo-therapy, immunotherapy and radiation; minimally-invasive procedures, such as laparoscopy, coronary stent insertion and video-assisted thoracoscopy; and artificial joint and heart valve replacements.

None of those technological developments were birthed miraculously. They owe a significant part of their realization to public and private strategies and public and private investments. Collectively the strategies and investments form the kernel of science and technology policy. Navigating the Maze is a narrative covering more than 230 years of American science and technology history. It contains stories with many unexpected twists and turns, illustrating how we got to where we are today and how we can shape the world of tomorrow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michael Lubell is the Mark W. Zemansky Professor of Physics at the City College of the City University of New York (CCNY). He has spent much of his career carrying out research in high-energy, nuclear and atomic physics, as well as quantum optics and quantum chaos, and is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society He is well known in public policy circles for his ground-breaking work in Washington, DC, where he served as director of public affairs of the American Physical Society for more than two decades. He has published more than 300 articles and abstracts in scientific journals and books and has been a newspaper columnist and opinion contributor for many years. He has been active in local, state and national politics for half a century and has lectured widely in the United States and Europe. Navigating the Maze is his first full-length book.
 

In this talk, I will discuss the optical biopsy (OB) techniques we have used for cancer diagnosis. Currently the gold-standard method for cancer diagnosis is needle biopsy along with histopathology. This process is invasive, time consuming, and subjective due to the judgment of pathologists. OB is a collection of alternative optical spectroscopy and imaging techniques that are used as diagnostic tools and have attracted enormous attention in the past decades. Native fluorescence spectroscopy (NFS) and Raman spectroscopy (RS) are two important OB techniques which can detect biochemical and morphological information in biological samples at the molecular level based on the excitation, emission, or vibrational properties of the molecules. Such techniques are label free and non-invasive, and can operate rapidly in vivo. We have used these techniques to diagnose different types of cancer, distinguish normal and cancerous tissues, identify cancer grades, detect metastatic ability of cancer cells, etc. 
In particular, I will discuss a new Raman technique, visible resonance Raman (VRR) using 532nm for excitation. Most Raman-based cancer studies in the literature have used near-infrared (NIR) laser excitation, where Raman signal is very weak. Using high power (e.g. 300mW) or long exposure time (e.g. minutes) led to limitation of the technique for practical applications. In contrast, due to the resonance effect, VRR was shown to provide enhanced Raman peaks for key biomolecules which may be used as markers for cancer diagnosis. 
In the meantime, I will discuss the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the research. Often times, analyzing spectral or imaging data from biological samples is challenging due to the complexity of the data. Machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) for AI has been shown to be a promising approach to analyze the “big” data. AI can detect salient features from the high-dimension spectral data, reveal biochemical and morphological information, for accurate diagnosis and prognosis of cells/tissue. 
Optical biopsy with AI techniques brings great opportunities to the field of healthcare. In particular, it provides promising novel techniques for accurate, noninvasive, early detection of cancers.
 

We are now experiencing a revolution in optical technologies: in the past the state of the art in the field of photonics transitioned from individual miniaturized optical devices to massive optical circuits on a microelectronic chip that can be modified on demand. This revolution is ongoing –new materials and technologies are emerging to control the flow of light in unprecedented ways and it is opening the door to applications that only a decade ago were unimaginable.
 

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The physical laws are very special: they allow not only for life to appear and develop, but to develop up to high forms compatible with thinking about nature and about thinking itself. Following conventional terminology, this remarkable feature of the laws may be called anthropness. The laws are even more special though: being sufficiently rich in  complicated solutions for the anthropness, they are, at the same time, sufficiently simple and elegant to be discoverable by these very anthropoi. They are also universal, very precise and in a sense complete. A universe with such laws, both complicated and simple, may be called Pythagorean, in honor of the great ancient thinker who first somehow foresaw this. Why are the laws both anthropic and discoverable, making our universe Pythagorean? What answers have been suggested so far? Is there at least one that is reasonable?

Speaker: Alexey Burov was born and raised in Novosibirsk, USSR. He defended his PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics at Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk, and his main expertise relates to charged particle beams. Since 1997 he has been working at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). He worked at CERN during its Run I, when the Higgs boson was discovered. Alexey is an author of many journal publications on beam optics, cooling, diffusion and instabilities; he is a Fellow of American Physical Society. Apart from physics, he also authored numerous philosophical essays, in Russian and in English, many of them together with his son Lev. Their treatise “Genesis of a Pythagorean Universe” received an award from the Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi.org. Since 2013, Alexey authors a philosophical blog (in Russian, at snob.ru), and chairs the philosophy society at Fermilab (in English), which he founded. Many of his philosophical compositions are published in major Russian literary magazines.

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Topic: Colloquium: Flaviano Morone 
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Optical quantum computing (OQC) is a major paradigm of quantum information. In standard OQC, quantum information is processed by laser light traveling on a large table top. Over the last several years, we have worked to develop an alternative approach using microwave photons traveling on-chip in a superconducting circuit. Using superconducting parametric cavities, we have already demonstrated much of the toolbox of linear quantum optics, but also extended it by taking advantage of the strong nonlinearities of superconducting circuits. In this talk, we present a series of experiments demonstrating the capability of this system. In a first, we show that we can create genuine tripartite entanglement of propagating microwave photons. The approach used is easily scalable to more modes. In a second set of experiments, we use the parametric cavities as a platform for analog quantum simulation of lattice field theories.  Preliminary results already show the promise of the platform for this application.  For instance, a single device can simulate a number of different models, including topological and chiral models, in a flexible and programmable way. Finally, we look at experimental progress towards generating a type of “magic state” for OQC called the cubic-phase state, which has remained elusive to experimenters in traditional quantum optics.  The cubic-phase state and its relatives would allow universal quantum computation using linear quantum optics. We have successfully generated non-Gaussian generalized squeezed states across one, two and three modes, which are an important experimental step towards these magic states.

About the Presenter
Christopher Wilson received his B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1996. There he performed undergraduate research on the role of nonlinear dynamics in the nervous system using analog circuit simulators. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Yale University in 2002. His dissertation focused on the development of single-photon optical spectrometers using superconducting tunnel junctions.  He then worked at Yale as the W.M. Keck postdoctoral fellow where he started work on quantum computation and information processing using superconducting single-electronics. In 2004, he moved to Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, later becoming an assistant professor in 2007 and an associate professor in 2011. In 2011/2012, he spent a sabbatical year working at a biomedical startup company in Pasadena, where we worked on signal processing and machine learning for medical diagnostics.  Starting in 2012, he became an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, where he holds appointments in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Institute for Quantum Computing.  He was appointed professor in 2017 and has served as the Director of the Graduate Program at IQC since 2018. His research focuses on applications of superconducting quantum electronics to quantum information, computing and sensing and the foundations of quantum mechanics. His work has been recognized internationally, receiving the 2012 Wallmark prize from the Royal Swedish Academy and being named one of the top 5 breakthroughs of 2011 by Physics World magazine.

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Topic: Colloquium : Christopher Wilson
Time: Sep 21, 2020 12:15 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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Cavity Magnonics (also known as Cavity Spintronics [1] and Spin Cavitronics) is an emerging field that studies the strong coupling between cavity photons and collective spin excitations such as magnons. It connects some of the most exciting modern physics, such as quantum information and quantum optics, with one of the oldest science on the earth, the magnetism. 
So far, most studies in this new field have been focused on coherent magnon-photon coupling, which enables diverse transducing functions in quantum and spintronics systems [2]. In this talk I will introduce an intriguing dissipative magnon-photon coupling governed by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian [3], which describes the physics of open quantum systems. It leads to level attraction [3], exceptional points [4], and nonreciprocal photon transmission [5]. This stream of research may open the avenue for developing open cavity magnonics that enables directional control of quantum and spintronics systems.
 
[1] C.-M. Hu, Phys. in Canada, 72, No. 2, 76 (2016); Y.P. Wang and C.-M. Hu, J. Appl. Phys. 127, 130901 (2020).
[2] D. Lachance-Quirion, et al., Appl. Phys. Express 12, 070101 (2019).
[3] M. Harder, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 121, 137203 (2018).
[4] D. Zhang, et al., Nat. Commun. 8, 1368 (2017).
[5] Yi-Pu Wang, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 123, 127202 (2019).

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Topic: Colloquium : Can-Ming Hu
Time: Oct 5, 2020 12:15 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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The remarkable photonic properties of self-assembled quantum dots position them as promising platforms for quantum computation, communication, and the realization of quantum networks. In particular, the strong coupling between quantum dot spins to photonic structures enables the generation of spin-photon and photon-photon entanglement. In this talk, I will present recent developments in the implementation of arbitrary sequenced control of the quantum dot spin, which incorporate optimized microwave waveform generation and electro-optical modulation. Such a versatile control leads to prolonged quantum dot coherence times essential for quantum information storage, and enhances spin and photon entanglement manipulation capabilities utilizing photonic crystal cavities.  Finally, by introducing the system of quantum dot “molecules” that feature a decoherence-free subspace, I will emphasize the potential of such spin control techniques toward the realization of hybrid photonic interfaces.

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Topic: Queens College Physics Colloquium 
Time: Oct 19, 2020 12:15 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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Topic: Queens College Physics Colloquium 
Time: Oct 26, 2020 12:15 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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In the last few decades astronomical observations have revealed the strange nature of the Universe. Observations of phenomena at vastly different ages of the Universe consistently require more than baryonic matter and baryonic physics to be explained. Both dark energy, the cause of the accelerated expansion of the Universe, and dark matter, mostly responsible for the gravitational build-up of large scale structure in the Universe, have, to date, no clear physical explanation. By putting strong limits on the energy density of these dark components with astronomical observations, theoretical models of dark matter and dark energy can be tested and refined.

A promising tool is to study the growth of structure through cosmic time. Higher density of dark matter in the Universe leads to more clustered matter distributions at the present time, whereas dark energy pulls these structures apart. Therefore, by measuring the number and mass of large objects in the Universe, we can determine the energy density of the dark components. The largest objects in the Universe are galaxy clusters and their rarity makes them a very powerful probe of cosmology. Approximately 85% of the mass of clusters is in the form of dark matter and and requires a probe of gravitating mass to be weighed. Mass estimates based on the baryonic content of the cluster are known to be biased from simulations, but gravitational lensing provides the tool to measure an unbiased total mass of dark matter and light-emitting matter. The combination of gravitational lensing with baryonic mass proxies is the key to galaxy cluster cosmology.

I will review how galaxy clusters are found and discuss the latest gravitational lensing measurements of galaxy clusters and their impact on cosmology.​
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Topic: Queens College Physics Colloquium 
Time: Nov 2, 2020 12:15 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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In recent years photonic neural networks have been identified as promising systems for ultra-high speed neural network hardware with the potential of increasing energy efficiency. Numerous strategic breakthroughs have been achieved, yet a fully implemented and stand alone photonic neural networks is still to be demonstrated. I will give an overview over the field and discuss strategic road blocks.

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Topic: Queens College Physics Colloquium 
Time: Nov 9, 2020 12:15 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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Topic: Queens College Physics Colloquium 
Time: Nov 16, 2020 12:15 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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Directional amplification of light in non-reciprocal photonic systems is an exciting effect with applications in measurements of weak signals and quantum information processing. Here we examine this effect from the point of view of topology. We show that there is a correspondence between directional amplification and the existence of a topological non-trivial phase that is the photonic analogous of a topological insulator. This surprising connection will allow us to use topological band theory to predict the performance of quantum amplifiers and sensors based on the symmetries of the underlying photonic lattice.

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Topic: Queens College Physics Colloquium 
Time: Nov 23, 2020 12:15 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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