Leopold Infeld Colloquium
2006/2007 | 2007/2008 | 2008/2009 | 2009/2010 | 2010/2011 | 2011/2012 | 2012/2013 | 2013/2014 | 2014/2015 | 2015/2016 | 2016/2017 | 2017/2018
2015-06-11 (Thursday)
room 0.06, Pasteura 5 at 15:30 
Prof. dr hab. Marek Demiański (Instytut Fizyki Teoretycznej Wydziału Fizyki UW)The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation at 50
Fifty years ago two radio engineers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson serendipitously discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation. I will discuss the early attempts to determine its spectrum and briefly present results of the three subsequent satellite missions: COBE, WMAP and Planck. I will also present recent attempts to measure the level of polarization of the CMB radiation and restrictions that they impose on the models of very early evolution of the universe.
2015-05-21 (Thursday)
room 0.06, Pasteura 5 at 15:30
Prof. Patrick Dewilde (TUM-IAS, Germany)Information, Communication and Computing: Past, Present and Future
The field of Information, Communication and Computing, sometimes abbreviated to ICC or ICT (with T=Technology) is characterized by a number of major discoveries mainly due to progressing insights in physics, mathematics and some other fields of science and technology.
In the presentation, I shall review the main past discoveries and discuss the present day playing field, to end with what I consider the main challenges for the future, trying, in particular, to motivate needed further developments in the key domains of science involved.
2015-05-15 (Friday)
room 0.06, Pasteura 5 at 14:15
Professor Aleksander Wolszczan (Pennsylvania State University)Searching for radio flares from ultracool dwarfs and exoplanets
Detections of both coherent and incoherent, non-thermal radio emission from exoplanets represent a direct way to study their magnetic fields. For example, time-frequency mapping of radio flares generated by the cyclotron maser mechanism can be used to constrain the planet’s magnetic field topology and use it to infer the nature of the dynamo mechanism. In addition, because magnetic fields protect planets from stellar winds and flares, detecting and characterizing exoplanetary fields would obviously inform the investigations of planetary habitability. I will discuss the ongoing efforts to detect the flaring and the quiescent radio emission from the coolest brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets. In particular, I will present the most recent detections of flares from two T-type brown dwarfs with the Arecibo radio telescope. These detections suggest that the same should be possible for hot, young exoplanets such as the recently discovered HR8799 system.