What's On at UWA

MRI is an incredibly versatile imaging modality stemming from the wide range of approaches that can be applied to generate image contrast. While qualitative imaging is common in clinical MRI, increasingly quantitative methods capable of measuring molecular tissue properties are being exploited. In this seminar I will present an overview of my research focussing on the application of quantitative MRI approaches to measure and map the distribution of; 1) iron, fat and fibrosis in the body and 2) magnetic nanoparticles to enable cell tracking and biodistribution studies of therapeutic agents.

The rules and details of UWA's Three Minute Thesis Competition will be described, and guidance will be given on how to present a talk suitable for this event. Doctoral and Masters Researchers, ECRs and academics within 7 years of PhD completion are eligible to compete.

Supercomputer simulations have played a transformative role over the last 30 years in establishing the paradigms of the growth of cosmic structure and galaxy formation. Theoretically they allow us to tackle problems that are otherwise intractable analytically, such as predicting the structure of the cosmic web and the internal properties of galaxies. Observationally they allow us to build virtual universes that allow us to interpret the results of large galaxy surveys. I'll review what goes into one of these simulations, explaining why and how supercomputers have proven to be crucial. I'll also highlight key predictions from simulations and identify areas where more work is needed as we enter the era of SKA-science.

Considered world leaders in the areas of 3D art and film, UWA has been recreated in the virtual world of "Second Life". Join the founder, Jay Jay Jegathesan, on a magical journey to discover this world. For more information on UWA's virtual presence, visit www.uwainsl.blogspot.com

Pulsars are extraordinarily good clocks. This property has been exploited in a wide range of applications ranging from studying the interiors of neutron stars to testing theories of gravitation. Many pulsars, especially millisecond pulsars, are in orbit around another star, providing a near-ideal gravitational laboratory. The original binary pulsar, PSR B1913+16, discovered by Hulse and Taylor in 1974, has provided the first observational evidence for the existence of gravitational waves (GWs) and has verified that Einstein’s general theory of relativity is an accurate theory of gravitation. The Double Pulsar (PSR J0737-3039A/B), discovered at Parkes, is an extraordinary system that not only gives new insight into magnetospheric and pulse emission physics, it also an unrivalled system for testing gravitational theories. Direct detection of gravitational waves is a major goal of current astrophysics. A Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) can in principle give a direct detection of GWs at nanohertz frequencies. A secondary goal of PTA projects is the establishment of a “pulsar timescale” which, over long time intervals, may be more accurate than the best available timescales based on atomic clocks. Since mid-2004, the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) project has been making regular timing measurements of 20 millisecond pulsars with steadily improving precision. While we do not yet have a significant GW detection, our current upper limit seriously constrains standard models for galaxy evolution and formation of super-massive black holes in galaxy cores. In collaboration with the European and North American PTAs we have formed the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) to enhance progress toward PTA goals.

Richard N. Manchester CSIRO Fellow CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science Epping NSW Australia

Welcome to the Western Australian public sector and the never ending possibilities of working for the Government and contributing to the administration of the State. The public sector is made up of a wide range of government departments and agencies with locations throughout the whole of Western Australia. Although you may gain employment for one particular agency within the public sector you belong to a much larger workforce. Newly appointed public sector employees are given the opportunity to contribute to the efficient and effective administration of the State of Western Australia.

The variety of jobs in the public sector is huge - all students from all disciplines welcome.

Bookings on CareerHub - http://uwa.careerhub.com.au

Devices called GRADIOMETERS are well known instruments which have been designed for measuring the first spatial derivatives of physical fields (gravitational, magnetic, electromagnetic..). Moving-base gradiometry is an extremely challenging multi-discipline technology area that has been declared as a "holy grail" for applications like geophysical prospecting for oil & gas, minerals, water and for some other non-geophysical applications. This talk is about another option for measuring gradients in motion without using gradiometers as such. In the first look it is a Mission Impossible. However, new emerging technologies provide a basis for making this Mission Possible. I will describe how collaboration between The Australian International Gravitational Research Centre and the Centre for Gravitational Experiments of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Wuhan, China) has led to a new quest for this exciting new possibility.

This workshop is aimed at UWA’s international students to assist them in developing strategies for marketing themselves successfully to Australian employers. Learn about the importance of self –marketing, utilising contacts, researching and networking skills effectively, as well as managing employer expectations.

Bookings essential on CareerHub - http://uwa.careerhub.com.au

As the Australian LNG sector continues to grapple with productivity challenges, Doug Buckley, VP Commercial Shell Australia, will talk about the role innovation has to play in keeping Australia competitive in the global gas market, and attracting future investment.

Peter Hartley, BHP Billiton Chair in the Business of Resources at The University of Western Australia will discuss the possible implications of the US shale gas on natural gas markets and the impact on Australia as a major global LNG supplier. contact [email protected] for ticket prices and details

The Blood Service mobile unit will be located at the UWA Crawley campus 2 - 5 September and has many appointments available. To make an appointment call 13 95 96 or visit donateblood.com.au Every blood donation can save three lives and only takes one hour of your time.

Mathematica exhibits a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art image processing and analysis functions for two and three-dimensional image composition, segmentation, feature detection, transformation, alignment, and restoration. The talk will touch several image processing application areas and demonstrate how Mathematica's fully integrated, powerful mathematical capabilities aid the rapid prototyping of image processing algorithms. We will also show how to implement dynamic and interactive interfaces for routines that require manual intervention and how to incorporate Java, C/C++, and GPU-code in the Mathematica programming language.

Dr. Markus van Almsick studied theoretical physics at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and biomedical image analysis at the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He has held positions at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt, working on loop quantum gravity, isomer enumeration, stochastic line propagation models in image processing, and on high angular resolution diffusion imaging. For 25 years he has been a consultant to Wolfram Research Inc., contributing code to Mathematica, promoting the software with talks about scientific applications, and showing researchers how to solve their problems using Mathematica.

UPS is holding its AGM at PHYS 2.15 on Tuesday 8th October at 1pm. Every one is invited for a chance to be involved in our committee and get involved in future events.

Physics students, you will be given the opportunity to marvel at the third year common room and help ensure all the added perks the club has provided remain for years to come.

Free pizza will also be provided.

Over the past two decades we have made significant progress in our understanding of the fundamental nature of the elementary particle, called the Neutrino. The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) is a broad scientific program being developed in the United States as an international project to further study the neutrino particle. LBNE consists of an intense neutrino beam produced at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a highly capable set of neutrino detectors on the Fermilab campus (Near Detector), and a large underground liquid argon Far Detector at Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in the state of South Dakota. LBNE will make detailed studies of neutrino oscillations including measurements of the mass hierarchy and CP violation that take advantage of the 1300 km baseline. At the far site, the large underground detector will open a new window to the search for nucleon decay, supernova neutrinos, and interesting astrophysical phenomena. This talk will give an overview of our present understanding of neutrino physics the plans for the LBNE experiment.

Dr. Bipul Bhuyan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IIT Guwahati). Dr. Bhuyan got his Ph.D. degree in Physics from University of Delhi in 2003 by working on the Rare Kaon decay experiments (E787 & E949) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York. Prior to joining IIT Guwahati, Dr. Bhuyan worked on the BaBar experiment at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) as a Post-Doctoral Fellow as part of the University of Victoria, Canada group.

Dr. Bhuyan is an experimental particle physicist and is currently working with several International Collaboration to understand the Nature at the most fundamental level. In particular, Dr. Bhuyan is interested in understanding the matter anti-matter asymmetry in the Universe, which physicists believe to be due to a phenomenon called CP violation and the fundamental nature of the neutrino particles. Dr. Bhuyan is currently collaborating with the Belle and Belle II experiments at KEK in Japan, the Nova and the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) at Fermi Lab, USA and the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) experiment in India.

Virtually all branches of science have profited from the vast increase in computational power in recent decades. Yet, given that scientists are rarely trained as programmers, there is often a substantial barrier to harnessing this power and it is easy to lose track of results or get lost in data analysis. In my own work I study nanomagnetic systems where the interaction of multiple forces on different length scales leads to frustrated behaviour and complex dynamics. Despite this complexity, intense worldwide effort is directed towards the application of nanomagnetism in fields ranging from data storage to nanoscale sensing. From a computational point of view, nanomagnetic systems present huge challenges, both in terms of efficiently solving the underlying differential equations (especially in a finite-element framework), and in terms of subsequent data analysis, e.g. exploring large parameter spaces.

Guided by showcase examples from my own research on nanomagnetic and spintronic systems, I will give a hands-on, informal presentation of a few tools for efficient scientific computation, data analysis, and result documentation which I feel can be useful to a wide community of people. These will include: the IPython notebook (an interactive computational/documentation environment with optional parallelisation), FEniCS (a high-level finite-element framework for efficient, automated solution of differential equations) and Sumatra (an "automated electronic lab notebook for computational projects, with the aim of supporting reproducible research").

My hope is to inspire a wider inter-disciplinary discussion where people share thoughts about available tools and workflows that do (or don't) work for them.

Max is a theoretical mathematician-turned-computational physicist, doing his PhD at the Institute of Complex System Simulation (ICSS) at the University of Southampton, UK, and has a special interest in exploring how to make scientific research more reproducible and openly accessible. Max's stay at the School of Physics thanks to a UWA Research Collaboration Award. He is being hosted by the Spintronics and Magnetisation Dynamics Group and is working on applications of spintronic devices to biological sensing.

During the past decade, computational chemistry has had an increasingly important impact on almost all branches of chemistry as a new approach for solving chemical problems at the molecular level and in obtaining information that is not accessible by experiment (e.g. in investigations involving transient, reactive, toxic, rare, or hypothetical species).

Theoretical methods have now been refined to the point where, for medium-sized systems with up to ~50 non-hydrogen atoms, they can determine very accurate molecular structures, reaction energies, barrier heights, spectroscopic constants and electrical properties.

First-principles thermochemical methods, such as Wn theories,1 combine large-scale electronic structure calculations with sophisticated extrapolation techniques to achieve unprecedented accuracies in thermochemical predictions. I will briefly review the Wn theories and show that they can reproduce the most accurate experimental thermochemical data with a 2σ uncertainty of under 1 kJ mol–1.1 For spectroscopic constants, Wn methods afford predictions with near-spectroscopic accuracy (i.e. 2σ uncertainty of ~1 cm–1).2 I will also present recent theoretical advances that extend the applicability of these theories to larger systems.3 Finally, some illustrative applications to water clusters,4 water-catalyzed proton-transfers,5 DNA bases,3 amino acids,6 tetrapeptides,7 corannulene8 and C60 will be given.

A public lecture by Professor Stefan Theisen, Max-Planck-Institute for Gravitational Physics and 2013 IAS Short Stay Visitor.

Register: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/theisen Experimental physics explores natural phenomena from the smallest to the largest length scales, covering the world of subatomic particles at one end of the scale and the evolution of the cosmos at the other. Theoretical physics brings order to the wealth of experimental data. The aim is to explain the observed phenomena as following from as few `laws of nature’ as possible. This naturally requires trying to describe apparently disparate phenomena by the same physical theory, a process call `unification’. Examples include the work of Maxwell, who unified electricity, magnetism and optics, and Einstein, who unified space and time. After a brief tour through the milestones of unification since Newton, Professor Theisen will concentrate on the present status, which is contained in the two so-called standard models, the standard model of cosmology and the standard model of elementary particle physics. He will then provide a brief introduction to string theory.

A Preclinical Imaging Workshop on radiopharmaceutical, MRI & optical imaging is being held in the FJ Clarke Lecture Theatre at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital on Sunday November 3, 9 am – 3 pm.

This Workshop is aimed at workers with a strong interest in, but possibly limited experience with the imaging possibilities of model systems representative of human physiology, metabolism and diseases.

This workshop will examine the latest concepts in radiopharmaceutical, magnetic resonance and fluorescence imaging of tissues & small animal models, emphasising quantitation where relevant. Some topics covered will be; microPET imaging using F-18 or long half-life PET radiometal isotopes; radiolabelling of targeting biomolecules; calibrated irradiations in experimental oncology; Bioluminescent / fluorescent imaging; in vivo optical imaging including luciferase-based gene expression; images co-registration; applications of MR in toxicology and animal physiology; management of small animal experiments; creation and operation of a multifunctional preclinical imaging facility.

3D seismic is probably the most significant dataset we have to make decisions in offshore oil and gas exploration and development. Optimising the quality, cost and delivery time of this data is a challenging problem that could unlock billions of dollars in value. Each year the industry spends US$10 billion on marine acquisition which fundamentally underpins around $75 billion in drilling and around $500 billion in development CAPEX. In this talk I will discuss the drivers in survey design – cost, safety, schedule and quality. I will also propose what research potentially needs to be done to improve the process of survey design including large scale seismic modelling, quantifying “quality” and treating survey design as an inverse problem.

Many if not all galaxies contain supermassive black holes (SMBH). We study their growth and evolution by tidal accretion of stars and the presence of a central gas disk, and the motion of central SMBH during and after a galaxy merger. Dynamical Friction and superelastic three-body scatterings with stars will lead to the formation of a SMBH binary - two black holes of millions of solar masses orbiting each other in a distance comparable to the size of our planetary system. Relativistic corrections to Newtonian dynamics (so-called Post-Newtonian approximations) have to be taken into account at this stage, the SMBH binary orbit will have periastron shifts and ultimately lose energy by gravitational radiation emission. Spin-Spin and Spin-Orbit interactions of the SMBH's are taken into account. We show how such a binary emits gravitational radiation across a huge range of the frequency spectrum. Ground based and space based gravitational wave detection is discussed, including pulsar timing, and shows how gravitational wave astronomy will become in the future as rich as electromagnetic astronomy.

If time permits there will be some presentation of the computational science aspect of our work. To use graphical processing units (GPU) for general purpose computations is becoming more and more ubiquitous on all scales - from user's desktops to the most powerful supercomputers. China has been in the past four years pioneering this field, running some very powerful GPU clusters. Our algorithms and their performance and implementation on various GPU cluster architectures, including the recent Kepler hardware, will be shown.

In 1950’s Fermi, motivated by fundamental questions of statistical mechanics, started a numerical experiment in collaboration with Pasta and Ulam to test the ergodic properties of nonlinear dynamical systems. The chosen so-called FPU system was a one dimensional chain of N nonlinear coupled oscillators, described by a quadratic potential of nearby particle interactions plus a cubic perturbation. Fermi’s ergodic hypothesis states that a system under an arbitrarily small perturbing force becomes generically ergodic. Starting with the longest wavelength normal mode, the FPU system showed a non-ergodic behavior. Many pioneer works followed for the explanation of this paradox. The most prominent of them have been the work of Zabusky and Kruskal (1965), with evidence of connection between the FPU system in the thermodynamic limit and the pde Korteweg-de Vries, and the work of Flaschka et al. (1982), where the authors discovered a similar behavior of the FPU model in the Toda chain. Recent developments show a more complete picture of the problem and its explanation.