Oxford Physics Short Talks and Introductions

How do we know what the stars are made of when we've never been to one? Dr Andrew Steele shows us how to make a spectrometer, a device used by scientists to analyse light, using a cereal box and a CD.

Jesse Liu, winner of the the departmental Speaking Competition for undergraduates, gives a short talk on the physics of a violin. The violin and elastic band are both string instruments. Yet what is it about the first that allows it to produce sounds many would regard as beautiful? I'll explore the physics behind music and the violin to illuminate this intersection of art and science.

Tiffany Harte, Oxford Physics, discusses absolute zero temperatures and how by cooling atoms in a lab we can aim to replicate the coldest place in the Universe. I will be discussing how we cool atoms to create the coldest place in the Universe in the middle of a lab, and the fascinating states that emerge from these ultracold gases. We will look at cooling using lasers and evaporation, and see how the Highland Fling can explain giant quantum states.

A short flash talk from Peter Hatfield, Oxford Physics, who discusses the origins of the galaxies we see in our night sky and the mysterious nature of dark matter. Galaxies are huge clusters of hundreds of billions of stars - the Milky Way is our galaxy, itself just one of many billions more. But even these are diminutive compared with the sea in which they swim, dark matter, an unknown substance we cannot see with our telescopes. We will look back in time over more than half the age of the Universe to see how galaxies sloshed about in this ocean of dark matter during their creation and development, hopefully helping us learn more about the galaxies we see today and potentially even something about the mysterious nature of dark matter itself.

An exciting talk and demonstration about superconductivity and its potential practical applications by Ben Williams, Oxford Physics. Superconductivity is a weird property of some materials that has exciting applications both in the lab and outside, in new technologies. The only problem is, we don't quite know what makes superconductivity work! In this talk, you'll see superconductivity in action and find out how, just like modern-day alchemists, physicists are looking to turn the mundane into the magical!

Joe Hitchen, Oxford University Physics Department, describe the different stages of sea ice growth and the formation of hollow tubes of ice in the ocean known as brinicles. Every year, millions of square kilometres of the Arctic ocean freeze over as sea ice forms but this growth is controlled by processes on the scale of millimetres and centimetres. At this scale, sea ice is not a pure solid but a mixture of ice crystals and concentrated brine known as a "mushy layer". I will describe the different stages of sea ice growth and the formation of hollow tubes of ice in the ocean known as brinicles.

In this talk Nazim Hussain, Oxford University, will provide an introduction to matter and antimatter and the interplay between them. As far as we can tell, our universe is filled with galaxies and planets (and people) all of which are made of matter. But, our universe could have been absolutely empty with nothing in it at all! In this talk, I will provide an introduction to matter and antimatter and the interplay between them. I shall also explain how the fact that we live in a universe filled with matter is one of the mysteries of modern physics, a puzzle that particle physicists are trying to resolve using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory.

The discovery of the Higgs boson last summer is widely regarded as one of the most important scientific discoveries of our time. This talk will take you on a quick journey describing why we were searching for this elusive particle, and the experimental challenges involved in finding it.

How does a quantum computer work? Why is a quantum computer so much better than a traditional computer? This talk will give you an insight into the strange features of the quantum world that we can exploit to develop a super fast quantum computer.

Magnetic particles can get frustrated in their interactions with other particles because of lattice geometry. Lots of new and exciting physics is involved in understanding how they deal with their frustration.