Add to Calendar 2026-11-19T10:00:00 2026-11-19T11:00:00 Understanding the landscape of Innovation at UBC: commercialization, entrepreneurship and partnerships in the Quantum space Event Information: We will have Ian Bell from InnovationUBC come share information and insights into the challenges and supports available for innovation in quantum science and technology. There will be lots of time for questions and discussion so please bring your thoughts and questions! Ian brings more than 25 years of progressively senior experience across academic technology transfer, industry, and government, with a career focused on building partnerships, advancing knowledge translation, supporting commercialization, and connecting researchers with external partners and opportunities. Event Location: BRIM 311

Add to Calendar 2026-11-26T10:00:00 2026-11-26T11:00:00 X-ray Spectroscopy of Many-Body States and Interactions Event Information: Many-body systems host states where many different degrees of freedom are intertwined. This makes them exceptionally difficult to investigate, but also gives unprecedented opportunity to control energy and information transfer across chemical and physical states. In this talk, I will show some recent efforts to study and control these interactions leveraging the technique of resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS). In the first part of the talk, I will show our discovery of intertwined interactions between plasmons and high-order phonons in the layered copper oxides [1,2]. These hybrid modes may have important implications for high temperature superconductivity, but also can be potentially useful as quantum transducers and parametric converters. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss how RIXS revealed a new chemical paradigm to construct Kondo insulators [3], correlated systems where the charge and spin gap arise from many-body Kondo interactions. Subsequently, we studied the dynamics of this many-body system under perturbation, using an optical-pump RIXS-probe method at an FEL [4]. [1] K.-J. Xu et al. Strongly-coupled hybrid lattice-plasmons in layered cuprates. arXiv:2605.29100 (2026).[2] K.-J. Xu et al. Selective coupling of high-order phonons in La2-xSrxCuO4. arXiv:2609.08076 (2026).[3] K.-J. Xu et al. Spectroscopic evidence for a molecular orbital Kondo insulator. arXiv:2605.30293 (2026).[4] K.-J. Xu et al. Persistent photo-enhancement of molecular orbital excitations in the Kondo insulator FeSb2. arXiv: 2610.27630 (2026).  Event Location: BRIM 311