When I first studied physics in Göttingen in the mid-1990s, the idea that I would one day spend my career watching zebrafish hearts beat and marine worms develop would have seemed improbable at best. Yet the tools that physics provides — optics, engineering, quantitative thinking — turn out to be exactly what modern biology needs most. In this talk, I argue that the most important contribution a physicist can make to the life sciences is not a new theory, but a new instrument — and a new way of sharing it. Just as telescopes in astronomy and accelerators in particle physics have become community resources that have transformed entire fields, the microscope must evolve from a personal laboratory tool into a shared, open infrastructure. This is the idea behind Flamingo: a modular, open light-sheet fluorescence microscope designed to travel between labs, to be built and modified by its users, and to bring state-of-the-art imaging to biologists who would otherwise never have access to it. I will show what becomes possible when physicists and biologists work in genuine exchange — from imaging the developing embryo across scales of space and time, to uncovering the mechanics of the beating heart. The microscope, it turns out, is not just an instrument. It is an argument about how science should be done.
Abstract: Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) is one of the payloads onboard Aditya-L1 mission of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It provides full-disk and region of interest images of the Sun in 200-400 nm using 11 different science filters, including Mg II h&k and Ca II H and other continuum channels, with a pixel size of 0.6 arcsec. In this talk, I will present a brief description of the instrument including current status, followed by some early science results.
Coexistence of different dynamical phases is a hallmark of glassy dynamics. This is well-studied in classical systems where the underlying theoretical framework is that of large deviation theory. The presence of a similar phase coexistence has been suggested in monitored quantum many-body systems, but the lack of suitable methods has yet prevented a systematic large deviation analysis. Here we present a tensor network framework that allows the application of large deviation theory to large quantum systems. Building on this, we locate a series of first-order dynamical phase transitions in a monitored discrete-time many-body quantum dynamics, at the level of the trajectory space. Crucially, our approach provides access not only to large-deviation statistics but also to conditioned quantum many-body states, enabling a microscopic characterization of the dynamical phases and their coexistence.
