IST-Physics Visitor Programme

The IST – Physics Visitor Programme aims to fund temporary stays of international Professors/Researchers (hereinafter referred to as visitors) invited by the Department of Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico (DF-IST) to engage on teaching/research activities that promote high-quality academic and scientific exchange. These visits are intended to foster student contact with cutting-edge research topics and new pedagogical methods in emerging scientific fields of Physics and Engineering Physics. This will provide students from all three study cycles at DF-IST, and ideally from other IST degrees, access to innovative and interdisciplinary approaches.

Futur visitors and activities:

• September 2025: Professor Visitante Jeff Steinhauer (Technion, Israel)
  Mini course (2 lectures): Hawking radiation in an acoustic Black Hole
  Dates: 15 September (16h30 - 18h30) and 18 Sepembert (10h30 - 12h30)
  Room:
  
  More info and registration (deadline 13 September) here
  
  A certificate of attendance will be issued to all students completing the course.
  
  Brief description: This two-session mini-course provides students with an intuitive view of Hawking radiation in a sonic black hole. Hawking radiation is a semiclassical phenomenon, and we will discuss both the classical and quantum aspects during the first session. We will also discuss the observations via the density-density correlation function. In the second session, students will run and modify the provided Python code to simulate emission of thermal Hawking radiation, analyze the resulting correlation functions, and compare their simulations with real experimental data. The activity concludes with a short writing exercise in which students will explain what they have learned about the correlation function. This hands-on course brings the abstract concept of Hawking radiation to the real world.
  
  About the Lecturer: JEFF STEINHAUER is a Full Professor of Physics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He leads the Atomic Physics Group, where he studies analogies between ultracold atomic systems and gravity. Steinhauer is best known for creating a sonic black hole in a Bose–Einstein condensate and for the first laboratory observation of spontaneous Hawking radiation, showing that emitted phonons have a thermal spectrum and are entangled. He earned his Ph.D. at UCLA on superfluid helium, held postdoctoral positions at the Weizmann Institute and MIT, and has since become a pioneer in analogue gravity experiments.