Seminar

Dr. Huang received a B.S. in Chemistry from Nanjing University, China in 2000. After receiving an M.S. in 2002 also from Nanjing University, he started his Ph.D. research with Professor Mostafa A. El-Sayed at Georgia Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. in 2007. Dr. Huang then began postdoctoral research with Professor Gabor A. Somorjai at University of California,...

The Manhattan Project was the United States Army’s effort to develop the first generation of nuclear weapons, which were used against Japan in August, 1945 and helped bring World War II to an end. The Project involved the coordination of hundreds of thousands of people to solve challenging problems in physics, engineering, large-scale industrial organization, production, security, personnel training, political and military strategy, and ethics that were unique for their time and whose legacies are still with us today. The methods by which various scientific and...

This colloquium will describe a program developed for a desktop computer which carries out a time-dependent simulation of the core of an exploding nuclear weapon. The logic of the program is understandable to any student familiar with kinematics and vectors; the necessary nuclear concepts will be introduced as needed. The simulation models a core comprising a mixture of two isotopes: A fissile one (such as uranium-235) and an inert one (such as uranium-238) that captures neutrons and removes them from circulation. The user sets the enrichment percentage and...

The quest of new states of matter in the time domain and the need for ultrafast control of material properties have been fueled by the recent advance of large-scale ultrafast x-ray facilities. These new experimental capabilities enable direct probe of structural dynamics with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, shedding light on the fundamental material processes and guiding the design of ultrafast devices. In the first example, I will show that the ultrafast optical and terahertz excitations offer new pathways of controlling lattice structure of...