Talks

Diamond anvil cells and shock techniques now permit the study of matter under multimegabar (i.e. several hundred GPa) pressures. The properties of matter in this pressure regime differ drastically from those known at 1 atm. Just how different physics and chemistry are at high pressure and the role that a chemical intuition for bonding and structure can have in understanding matter at high pressures will be explored in this lecture. I will discuss in detail an overlapping hierarchy of responses to increased density, consisting of (a) squeezing out van der Waals space (for molecular crystals); (b) increasing coordination; (c) decreasing the bond length of covalent bonds and the size of anions; and (d) an extreme regime of electrons moving off atoms and new modes of correlation. Examples of the startling chemistry and physics that emerge under such extreme conditions will alternate in this account with qualitative chemical ideas about the bonding involved.

The space-based gravitational wave detector LISA may be able to detect gravitational waves from a first order phase transition at the electroweak scale. Acoustic waves produced during the transition are largely responsible for the resulting signal. I will present results from a large campaign of simulations studying such phase transitions, determining the spectral shape of the gravitational wave power spectrum with unparalleled accuracy. Measuring a cosmological stochastic background could place constraints on the phase transition parameters, such as the nucleation rate and temperature, and therefore provide important information about physics beyond the Standard Model. However, better understanding of the source, as well as the underlying theories of physics beyond the Standard Model, is required before the launch of LISA. I will outline how this understanding can be developed.