The Compton Lectures: 50 Years of Discovery
Saturdays, 11 AM
Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 S Ellis Ave, Room 106
October 3, 2026
Rocky Kolb
EFI and the Chicago School of Particle Cosmology
Fifty years ago cosmology was a fringe area of science, with little data and little theoretical effort. For the most part particle physicists did not appreciate that the big bang could be used to explore nature at energy scales unreachable with even the most powerful terrestrial accelerators. The Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, in collaboration with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, led the world in the development of the new field of Particle Cosmology. We are still at the leading edge of exploring the connections between the inner space of particle physics and the outer scape of the cosmos.
October 10, 2026
John Carlstrom
Exploring the Big Bang from the South Pole
This talk will review measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), especially those obtained with our specialized telescopes deployed at the South Pole over the last three decades, and what they have taught us about the origin and evolution of our universe. We will then discuss our plans using new instruments at the South Pole to search for the tell-tale signal in the polarization of the CMB of gravitational waves generated by Inflation, a putative burst of super-luminal accelerated expansion at the dawn of time that led to creation of our universe.
October 17, 2026
Andy Davis
50 Years of Discovery at the Birthplace of Coscmochemistry
The field of cosmochemistry got its start at the University of Chicago, when some of the remarkable scientists who worked here on the Manhattan Project turned their attention to isotopes and their uses in understanding natural processes in our Solar System and beyond. A couple of the key EFI discoveries in the past 50 years include the following. (1) Meteorites and Mars have oxygen isotopic compositions different from those on Earth; the Sun is significantly different from all measured rocky bodies in the Solar System. (2) Actual grains of stardust, mostly silicon carbide and graphite, can be separated from meteorites. The wide range of isotopic compositions of individual grains shows that each grain came from a single dying low-mass star, maybe twice the mass of the Sun, or a massive star that exploded as a supernova. I’ll discuss these discoveries and more.
October 24, 2026
Marcela Carena
Broken Symmetries and the Origins of Mass and Matter
Broken symmetries in Nature underpin our understanding of many materials, from ferromagnets to superconductors. In the 1960s UChicago professor Yoichiro Nambu had the bold insight that because empty space is not really empty, the quantum vacuum can break symmetries. Peter Higgs then proposed that an invisible quantum field fills the universe, breaking symmetry and giving mass to elementary particles. Higgs’ idea was dramatically confirmed by the discovery of the Higgs boson particle at CERN, raising the even deeper question of how the Higgs field turned on instants after the Big Bang. A related mystery is the breaking of charge-parity (CP) symmetry linking matter and antimatter, first revealed in the decay of K mesons. Explaining CP violation in the Standard Model required both the Higgs field and a third generation of quarks, confirmed by the discovery of the bottom and top quarks at Fermilab. This CP violation could have explained why more matter than antimatter was produced in the early universe, through a process called electroweak baryogenesis. However, the measured CP violation gives a result roughly ten billion times too small and the discovered Higgs boson is too heavy, implying that new particles and new forces are required for electroweak baryogenesis to work. The full story must have more ingredients, perhaps involving dark matter or neutrinos. Future experiments may finally shed light to why there is matter rather nothing – and why we exist.
October 31, 2026
Jeff Harvey
From Hadrons to Gravitons, 50 Years of String Theory at the Enrico Fermi Institute
November 7, 2026
Luca Grandi
The 85% We Cannot See: The Long, Tireless Quest for Dark Matter
For the past half-century, modern astrophysics has faced a profound and humbling truth: most of the matter in the universe is completely invisible. While the stars, planets, and everything we can see account for just a tiny fraction of the cosmos, an elusive substance known as dark matter holds galaxies together. But what exactly is it?
In this public colloquium, we will journey through 50 years of cosmic mapping and laboratory searches, charting how a bizarre astronomical puzzle transformed into a high-stakes quest in particle physics. We will explore how the effort to explain these vast cosmic structures led to the hypothesis of an undiscovered subatomic particle, and the ingenious ways scientists have tried to "see" the unseeable, with a journey through frontline experiments and a special nod to those spearheaded by researchers at the Enrico Fermi Institute. Pushing the boundaries of human technology over the decades, these ultra-sensitive detectors have evolved to catch the faintest whisper of this elusive substance. While a definitive answer has yet to be found, here we will review how these decades of quiet data have successfully narrowed the hiding places for dark matter, and why the quest to illuminate the dark side of the cosmos remains one of the most thrilling adventures in physics today.
November 14, 2026
Daniel Holz
A Decade of Graviational-Wave Science
Ten years after the first direct detection of a gravitational-wave event, we now have a catalog of a few hundred gravitational-wave events. I will give an overview of some of the highlights from this catalog, including some unusually loud, and some unusually massive, sources. I will also discuss some of the things we've learned from the population, including clues as to how the universe makes binary black hole systems, as well as novel cosmological probes.
November 21, 2026
Angela Olinto
Flying High to Catch Neutrinos and Other Extreme Particles
What can neutrinos and cosmic rays teach us about the most powerful processes in the universe?
Researchers are flying ultra-fast cameras on NASA science balloons to help answer that question, observing extremely energetic subatomic particles, including neutrinos and cosmic rays, arriving from the deepest corners of the cosmos.
Over the past decades, these scientific instruments have evolved to combine different types of observations, allowing researchers to learn more from these particles and better understand the extreme events that produce them.
In this talk, Angela V. Olinto, (Emeritus Professor Univ of Chicago, Provost and Rutherfurd Professor of Columbia University and a leading astrophysicist), will describe her work related to earlier balloon projects that helped develop this technology, and look ahead to a planned balloon flight in 2028, which promises to deepen our understanding of the powerful processes that shape our universe.
December 5, 2026
Young-Kee Kim
From Collisions to Precision
Over five decades, Chicago physicists have explored the fundamental laws of nature through increasingly powerful and precise particle experiments. This talk traces Chicago’s contributions to that journey—from landmark discoveries to precision tests of the Standard Model—and looks ahead to the unanswered questions that may point beyond it.
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