Lecturers 2024

Celsius lecturer: Professor Chris Polly

Chris Polly is a particle physicist working at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside of Chicago, IL. He did his undergraduate degrees in math and physics at Missouri University of Science and Technology and obtained his PhD in physics at University of Illinois. He has worked in particle accelerator-based experiments that utilize beams of sub-atomic particles, both muons and neutrinos, to explore the basic building blocks of matter and the fundamental forces governing them. Most recently he served as the Project Manager and Scientific Co-Spokesperson for the Muon g-2 experiment. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a winner of the prestigious 2021 Falling Walls nomination in Physical Sciences.

Lecture: The Magic of Muons

It has been 88 years since the discovery of the muon ushered in a revolution in our understanding of the basic constituents of matter. This enigmatic particle has intrigued scientists ever since and has been used for everything from X-raying pyramids to probing for the existence of other new particles and laws of nature in our quest to understand some of the greatest mysteries of our time. This talk will focus on some of the ways muons are being utilized in experiments today. In particular, intense particle accelerator-based sources, like the one at Fermilab, are paving the road to unprecedented sensitivity to new physics. Recent results from the Muon g-2 experiment and a broad overview of the future of muon physics will be presented.

Professor Johan Bijnens

Johan Bijnens obtained his master at the Catholic University of Leuven in 1982 and his PhD in 1985 at the California Institute of Technology.

He has had appointments at DESY, Hamburg, LMU, Munich, CERN, Geneva and Nordita Copenhagen before joining Lund University in 1997. My work is concentrated in low-energy particle with work on meson interactions, CP-violation and a number of precision observables.

Lecture: The Standard Model prediction of the muon anomalous magnetic moment

Predicting observables to very high precision is difficult. I will give an overview of what goes into the calculation of the muon anomalous magnetic moment in the Standard Model and what at present the main limitations are and improvement we can expect in the near future.

Associate Professor Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez

Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez is a particle physicist with experience in the two major scientific collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CMS and ATLAS.

During her time in CMS she performed significant Higgs boson physics work and played a key role in its discovery. She also had a notable impact in top quark research, including the first observation of single top quarks produced with W bosons.

In 2018, Rebeca joined the Uppsala ATLAS group and focused her attention on the fundamental open questions in the field. Her research interests span various aspects of new physics searches and data science methods. She is also actively engaged in the development of the particle colliders of the future, specifically the Future Circular Collider (FCC) also at CERN. Her research is supported by the Swedish research council, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Mathematics (CIM) in Uppsala, the AI4Research project, and the Carl Trygger Foundation.

Rebeca holds, and has held, multiple roles of scientific leadership, including Higgs to WW subgroup convener, single top subgroup convener, and the coordination of the whole top quark physics program in CMS. She currently coordinates the “Direct discovery potential” working group (WG1-SRCH) of the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) Higgs Factory Study and the BSM Physics Performance group for the FCC.

Lecture: Searches for physics beyond the Standard Model at the high energy frontier

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC experiments in 2012, high energy particle physics lacks, for the first time, a clear energy scale for new physics searches to target. No new particles have shown up other than the Higgs boson, and after hundreds of precision measurements, no significant deviations with respect to the predictions have been observed at the LHC. The Standard Model seems to just work.

However, we know that, in fact, the Standard Model does not work. It does not incorporate established experimental phenomena, such as neutrino masses, dark matter, and dark energy; it requires fine tuning and shows other theoretical inconsistencies. In addition, there are many small unexplained effects in different areas.

The upcoming upgrades to the LHC and the prospect of future colliders offer exciting opportunities to explore higher energy regimes and potentially discover new particles or phenomena that can solve this tension. Precision measurements are equally crucial, since subtle deviations with respect to the predictions could indicate the presence of new physics.

The challenges posed by some of the open questions, such as dark matter and dark energy, may require a multidisciplinary approach that combines insights from particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology.

This talk will discuss new physics searches at the current energy frontier and beyond, in future colliders. I will discuss the current status, the challenges faced, and the promising avenues for future research in high-energy particle physics. It's an exciting time for the field, with the potential for groundbreaking discoveries that could reshape our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.

Linnaeus lecturer: Jürgen Janek

Jürgen Janek is a full professor for Physical Chemistry at Justus Liebig University in Giessen (JLU), Germany, is director of the JLU Center for Materials Research and Scientific Director of the BELLA lab at KIT, Karlsruhe. He was visiting professor at Seoul National University (South Korea), Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan) and D'Aix-Marseille University (France), holds an honorary doctorate by TU Delft (Netherlands), is member of the Leopoldina – German National Academy of Sciences and was recently awarded with the first Greve Prize by Leopoldina. He holds numerous patents, has published more than 450 peer-reviewed papers and got numerous awards. His research interests focus on the physical chemistry of inorganic solids, solid state ionics and reactivity, specifically on the properties of mixed ionic-electronic conductors, defect chemistry of ionic materials, kinetics of solid-state reactions and solid-solid interfaces. In recent years his research is focused strongly on the chemistry of battery materials, solid electrolytes and solid-state batteries and operando studies of batteries. He is scientific coordinator of the German Cluster of Competence for Solid State Batteries FestBatt funded by BMBF (Federal Ministry for Education and Research) and member of the DFG Cluster of Excellence POLiS at Ulm/Karlsruhe.

Lecture: Electrochemical Energy Storage beyond Lithium-Ion Batteries

Lithium-ion batteries (LIB) have become the electrochemical core storage technology, and their field of application widens day by day. This also raises the question whether there will other elec-trochemical cell concepts that may take their place next to LIB. Two major directions of research and development are being pursued today: First, the quest for lithium-based batteries with even higher performance in terms of stored energy per mass or volume, rate of charging, durability, sustainability and cost. This explains the strong trend for solid-state batteries with high capacity anodes (particularly lithium metal). Second, the search for alternative battery cell concepts that may offer advantages in terms of the use of natural resources avoiding critical supply chains, re-ducing the carbon footprint of the battery and its cost. This explain the research in so-called “post-lithium” concepts, i.e., sodium ion batteries, magnesium-based batteries, organic redox batteries and others.

This lecture will then mainly provide an overview of the current research perspectives in this field, and will focus on the question whether solid-state batteries can surpass the current lithium ion technology based on liquid electrolytes. As part of this, the potential role of the lithium metal anode will be discussed, and both in situ and operando experiments on the function of the lithium metal anode will be presented. Whether sodium ion batteries and their solid-state versions can also suc-ceed will additionally be briefly discussed.

Professor Rakel Wreland Lindström

Rakel Wreland Lindström is Professor in Chemical Engineering at KTH, at the Division of Applied Electrochemistry. Her current research interests cover fuel cells and batteries, with focus on performance and ageing of commercial or novel components in Proton Exchange or Anion Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFC and AEMFC), Li-ion and Redox Flow Batteries (RFB). She has a PhD degree in Inorganic Chemistry from Göteborg University 2003. Before she acquired a faculty position at KTH 2009, she was a postdoc at Paris Tech/CNRS, and at Ulm Universität.

Lecture: Ageing of Commercial Lithiumion Batteries

Since lithium-ion batteries were launched about 30 years ago, the development has been significant, especially after they were introduced in electric vehicles. In addition to becoming less costly, cells have become larger and improved both in terms of energy density and lifetime. This presentation will give a glimpse of some knowledge we have acquired at Applied Electrochemistry, KTH from studying the aging of commercial cells through fruitful collaboration with the Swedish automotive industry, Uppsala University and Chalmers. In particular, we have studied heterogeneous aging due to cell design and usage. Uneven aging has been observed both along the jelly roll [2] as well as across the depth of the electrodes often at the graphite electrode, as uneven SEI growth or Li-plating, due to variations in conditions such as temperature and pressure. Better understanding, quantification and estimation of aging are important to advance battery design and optimize usage for longer lifetimes for the future.

Assistant professor Guiomar Hernández

Guiomar Hernández was appointed Docent in Chemistry in 2022 and she is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry - Ångström at Uppsala University. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Applied Chemistry and Polymeric Materials at the University of the Basque Country in 2017 working with redox-active polymers for energy storage. Her research interests include polymeric materials and electrolytes for safe and sustainable next-generation batteries.

Lecture: Boron-based binders and electrolytes for silicon-based lithium-ion batteries

Silicon is an abundant material with a really high theoretical capacity and the potential to replace graphite anodes to increase the energy density of lithium-ion batteries. This change could be straightforward as it does not require to modify completely the manufacturing processes established nowadays. However, silicon suffers from large volume changes during cycling and a continuous build-up of a solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) that consumes the electrolyte and lithium reservoir. These issues remain a challenge for the realization of silicon electrodes.

Self-healing binders are considered to be promising materials to help with the volume changes, however the mechanism on how they do it is not clear yet. We have used self-healing boron-based binders to improve battery performance with the aim to shed some light into the mechanism behind.

Regarding the electrolyte, we are focusing on fluorine-free alternatives that are environmentally friendlier and less toxic than the highly fluorinated state-of-the-art electrolytes. Our recent results on the SEI formation and breathing mechanism with boron-based electrolytes, in particular lithium bis(oxalate)borate (LiBOB), will also be presented.