Invitation to ICTP Colloquium on Friday 13 October 2017: "From Materials to Cosmology: Studying the early universe under the microscope", by Prof. Nicola Spaldin

[ICTP Director]

Dear All,

ICTP is pleased to announce that the forthcoming ICTP Colloquium, "From 
Materials to Cosmology: Studying the early universe under the 
microscope", by Prof. Nicola Spaldin, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland, will 
take place *on Friday 13 October at 15:30 hrs*, in the Budinich Lecture 
Hall, Leonardo Building, ICTP.

BIOSKETCH: Nicola Spaldin is the professor of materials theory at ETH 
Zurich. She developed the class of materials known as multiferroics, 
which combine simultaneous ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity, for 
which she received the 2017 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science award, 
among many other honors. She is a passionate science educator, director 
of her department’s study program, and holder of the ETH Golden Owl 
Award for excellence in teaching. When not trying to make a 
room-temperature superconductor, she can be found playing her clarinet, 
or skiing or climbing in the Alps.

ABSTRACT: The behavior of the early early universe just after the Big 
Bang is one of the most intriguing basic questions in all of science, 
and is extraordinarily difficult to answer because of insurmountable 
issues associated with replaying the Big Bang in the laboratory. One 
route to the answer -- which lies at the intersection between cosmology 
and materials physics -- is to use laboratory materials to test the 
so-called "Kibble-Zurek" scaling laws proposed for the formation of 
defects such as cosmic strings in the early universe. Here I will show 
that a popular multiferroic material -- with its coexisting magnetic, 
ferroelectric and structural phase transitions -- generates the 
crystallographic equivalent of cosmic strings. I will describe how 
straightforward solution of the Schroedinger equation for the material 
allows the important features of its behavior to be identified and 
quantified, and present experimental results of what seem to be the 
first unambiguous demonstration of Kibble-Zurek scaling in real 
materials. I will end with some very recent data showing that cosmic 
strings in multiferroics might be less unambiguous than they seem...

The abstract of the talk is available at http://indico.ictp.it/event/8405/

The Colloquium will be livestreamed at http://video.ictp.it/livestream

The poster is attached.

Light refreshments will be served after the lecture.

You are all very warmly invited to attend.

Office of the Director, ICTP