Below is the provisional termcard for Hilary Term 2010. The actual details of each event will be sent out a few days before each event in an email to the mailing list. To join the mailing list, look at the ‘Contact us’ page.
The talks should take place from 8.15pm in the Lindemann Lecture theatre of the Clarendon Laboratory in the Physics department (click here to a see map). We will meet members in the foyer of the Physics department from 8.00pm onwards. The talks usually last about an hour, and there is an opportunity to ask the speaker questions about their talk. There are refreshments afterwards, giving you the opportunity to meet other members of the society and people interested in Physics.
————————————————————-
2nd week (Tueday 26th January)
Talk by Prof David Wallace
————————————————————-
3rd week (Tuesday 2nd February)
Talk by Prof. Pietro Corsi.
————————————————————-
4th week (Tuesday 9th February)
Prof. Robin Nicholas – Graphene and carbon nanotubes – the new world of carbon based electronic materials.
“The discovery of graphene and carbon nanotubes is revolutionizing technology in a whole range of electronic and physical applications. The discovery of methods to produce graphene (which is a single monolayer of carbon atoms bonded together as benzene rings, or ‘atomic chicken wire’) in 2004 has opened up some very dramatic new areas of physics. On a practical level the development of nanoribbons and transistors offer the potential to replace silicon in electronics and produce a whole range of new devices.
Carbon nanotubes are just as remarkable and can be thought of conceptually as rolled up sections of graphene. They act as either metals or semiconductors depending on the tube diameter and are also fantastically strong, leading to all sorts of mechanical applications. Typical semiconducing nanotubes could also be used to replace semiconductors such as silicon or gallium arsenide and electronic applications include both sensing and transistor action as well as producing a variety of different nanostructures including the production of carbon based organic photovoltaic cells.”
————————————————————-
5th week (Tueday 16th February)
Prof. Richard Berry – The Biophysics of Nature’s Rotary Molecular Motors
The life sciences look set to dominate the 21st century in the same way as the physical sciences did the 20th. Physics is going to be part of this: we already know enough about the structures and mechanisms of the biomolecular machines of life to ask detailed and quantitative questions about the physics of how they work. I will briefly introduce biomolecules and their functions, and then talk about recent experiments in my lab and others that try to understand how they work, by experimenting on them one at a time.
————————————————————-
6th week (Tueday 23rd February)
Talk by Prof. Tim Palmer.
————————————————————-
8th week (Tuesday 9th March)
Talk by Prof. Amanda Cooper-Sarkar
