We are honoured to welcome Dr. Xavier Maeder, a leading expert in small-scale mechanics and characterisation techniques, who will give a lecture entitled:
\r\nBeyond Nanoindentation: Advanced Combined Approaches for Mechanical Characterization
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\r\nPlease note that this special event takes place during the 2026 Nanoindentation Course, which runs from 26–28 August 2026. More information about the course is available here.
\r\nThis event is open to all, so please feel free to share the invitation with colleagues, collaborators, students, or anyone else who may be interested in attending. Anyone who would like to attend can register using this form.
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\r\nWe look forward to welcoming you to EPFL for what promises to be an excellent opportunity to learn, exchange ideas, and network with scientists, engineers, industrial partners, and students working in related fields.
Please join us for the QSE Center Quantum Seminar with Ulf Leonhardt from the Weizmann Institute of Science who will give a talk about \"Fibre-optical analogue of the event horizon: Hawking radiation and backreaction\" on Thursday July 2nd from 12:00 to 13:30.
\r\nLocation:
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\r\nPizzas will be available at 12:00. All PhDs, postdocs, students, group leaders, and PIs are welcome to join us.
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\r\nTITLE: \"Fibre-optical analogue of the event horizon: Hawking radiation and backreaction\"
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\r\nABSTRACT:
\r\nHawking radiation - the emission of quantum particles at the event horizon of a black hole - connects gravity with quantum mechanics and thermodynamics; the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy has been the benchmark for potential quantum theories of gravity. But Hawking radiation has never been observed in astronomy, only in laboratory analogues and the chances of ever observing it in space are astronomically small. The energy of Hawking radiation must come from the gravitational field around the black hole, but how field quanta generate Hawking quanta has been unknown. In this talk I report on experimental and theoretical evidence for the process that generates Hawking radiation in a fibre-optical analogue of the event horizon. There, as in gravity, it has been believed that Hawking radiation comes from a complicated, cascaded process, but we have found a simple, direct process and measured its backreaction on the field. Our findings suggest an equally direct process for other laboratory analogues and perhaps also for gravitational fields, shedding light on how black holes might radiate.
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\r\nBIO:
\r\nUlf Leonhardt joined the Weizmann Institute of Science as Professor of Physics in November 2012 after an international career. Ulf Leonhardt was born in Schlema, in former East Germany, on October 9th 1965. He studied physics at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, at Moscow State University and at Humboldt University Berlin where he received his PhD in 1993. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Oregon Center for Optics in the US, a Habilitation Fellow at the University of Ulm in Germany and a Göran-Gustafson and Feodor-Lynen fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. From 2000 to 2012, he was the Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of St Andrews, UK. Ulf Leonhardt also had various visiting positions: in 2008 he was a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore and in 2011 at the University of Vienna; in 2012/13 he was an adjunct professor at South China Normal University, fsince 2026 he is a Global Fellow and visiting professor at Vienna Institute of Technology.
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\r\nUlf Leonhardt is the first from former East Germany to receive the Otto Hahn Award of the Max Planck Society. For his PhD thesis he received the Tiburtius Prize of the Senate of Berlin. In 2006 Scientific American listed him among the top 50 policy, business and research leaders of the world of that year. In 2008 he received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and in 2009 a Theo Murphy Blue Skies Award of the Royal Society. In 2012 he received a thousand-talent award of China. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Partial groups are, roughly speaking, groups in which the product of a given word of elements may not always be defined. They were introduced by Chermak to study the p-local structure of finite groups and come equipped with a \"domain,\" which consists in the set of words for which the product is defined. At first glance, given a fixed set X, it may seem possible to define infinitely many partial group structures on X by varying the domains, even while ensuring that all these structures have coherent products. For example, if G is a finite group, one might expect that there could be infinitely many different partial group structures \"contained\" in G by selectively removing sets of words from the domain.
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\r\nHowever, in a joint work with Philip Hakney, we show that finite partial groups are truly finite objects: they can be defined using only a finite set of data and, in particular, contain only finitely many \"partial subgroups.\" This follows from the fact that finite partial groups have finite dimension as symmetric sets.
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\r\nDuring the talk, we will explore both the algebraic and topological approaches to partial groups and no prior knowledge of the topic will be assumed
It has been 2 years since we began our journey with the Comet technology from Bio-Techne Spatial (Lunaphore), and we are pleased to celebrate this milestone with you.
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\r\nWe would like to invite you to learn about the technology, its capabilities, and the diverse projects that have been carried out at the facility.
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\r\nJoin us to discover how this technology could support your research projects!
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\r\nAttendance is free, but registration is mandatory. Pizza will be provided for lunch. You can find the agenda and registration information on the website.
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\r\nPlease feel free to share this invitation with colleagues who may be interested.
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\r\nWe look forwards to welcoming you on the 23rd of June 2026.
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\r\nBest regards,
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\r\nYour Histo team
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