Optomechanics—where Light meets Motion™ & Modelling weather extremes and catastrophic events in a changing climate

Speaker: Dr Jesse Slim
Affiliation: University of Queensland

Optomechanics—where Light meets Motion™

Abstract: Since the development of the laser and high-efficiency photodetectors, light has become one of our most precise tools to both measure and control motion. Optomechanics explores how photons and mechanical vibrations interact, enabling us to cool motion near absolute zero, sense tiny perturbations, and even study quantum effects in macroscopic objects. In this talk, I’ll give a brief introduction to the field, touch on some of my own work, and close with the most important question: Can we build lightsabres after all?

Biography: Dr Jesse Slim completed his undergrad at TU Delft (NL) and then moved on to AMOLF (Amsterdam, NL) for a PhD in optomechanics, experimentally demonstrating mechanical resonator networks coupled by light. After finishing the PhD in 2023, Jesse moved to Queensland for the weather (and a post-doc). Bound by his Dutch heritage, he is an avid cyclist and loves to camp.

Speaker: Dr Meagan Carney
Affiliation: University of Queensland

Modelling weather extremes and catastrophic events in a changing climate

Abstract: In this colloquium-style talk, we introduce ways of modelling extremes in weakly dependent stochastic processes using probability theory (e.g. extreme value theory). We investigate the extremes of these processes through the lens of dynamical systems where we can use mathematical approaches to establish convergence to extremal probability distributions. Finally, we show that we can use these laws to create more sophisticated statistical tools to model weather extremes and catastrophic events. Along the way, we will investigate assumptions in the theoretical setting that are often violated in real-world weather data and how we address these violations to obtain meaningful results.

Biography: Dr Meagan Carney is a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at The University of Queensland. She completed her PhD in Mathematics at the University of Houston, and her postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany. Meagan’s expertise lies in predicting extremes and rare events in complex systems, where she applies machine learning algorithms to assess the likelihood and impacts of events such as extreme weather occurrences and rare outcomes related to infectious disease.