Women in Physics Public Lecture. What do theoretical physicists do?

The AIP is delighted to announce that FLEET’s Professor Susan Coppersmith FAA FAIP, a theoretical physicist at UNSW Sydney, will tour Australia this year as the AIP’s 2024 Women in Physics Lecturer.

Susan with present a public lecture in Melbourne as part of her tour

See details online

Venue: RMIT City Campus, Building 80, Level 2, Room 2.

Susan has used principles of theoretical physics to understand a wide variety of systems ranging from sand to pearls to glasses to quantum dots used to make quantum computers.

Seashells, pearls and chalk are all made of calcium carbonate. Why are shells strong while chalk crumbles?

Susan has investigated how an organism makes seashells so strong by controlling the structure of a combination of brittle calcium carbonate with a small amount of soft organic material.

Better understanding of these processes enables scientists and engineers to combine brittle and flexible components to create new composite materials that are highly resistant to fracture.

Now she is working to predict how a combination of silicon and germanium, two materials used in current electronic technologies, can be used to fabricate quantum dots that could enable the creation of quantum computers.

This strategy has the advantage that it has the potential to leverage the investments that have been made for scaling up modern classical electronic devices to enable the manufacture of large-scale quantum computers.

And she’s exploring how these quantum devices could enable us to better study exploding stars and dark matter.

Full details on Susan’s research here

While in Melbourne, Susan will also visit local schools and is the keynote speaker at the Australian Institute of Physics,  Girls in Physics Brekky

FLEET and RMIT are sponsors of Susan’s public lecture