ORIGINS Lecture: Astromaterial Science of Neutron Stars

by Prof. Matt Caplan (Illinois State University)

Monday 18 May 2026, 17:00 → 18:00 Europe/Berlin

Old Seminar Room (401) (MPA)

Abstract: 
At sufficiently high temperatures matter becomes fully ionized, but under sufficiently high pressure those plasmas freeze solid. These “strongly coupled” plasmas have Coulomb energies orders of magnitude greater than their thermal energies and can be found in systems spanning electrically charged dusts to the crusts of neutron stars. While many of the physically interesting combinations of temperature and density are inaccessible to laboratory experiments on earth, numerical simulations allow us to study the detailed microphysics of these crystals, including how they break, with implications for starquakes, pulsar glitches, and more.

After talk drinks: 
We'll go for drinks after the lecture at Augustiner in Garching! Feel free to join and continue to chat with Matt there!

Bio: 
Matt Caplan is an Associate Professor at Illinois State University, currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was a CITA National Fellow at McGill and his PhD from Indiana University won the 2018 APS Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics. Beyond academia, Dr. Caplan is also a scriptwriter for Kurzgesagt and PBS Space Time. Also active in arms control, he was an inaugural fellow of the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction and he is the creator and host of the NPR podcast Twelve Thousand Bombs.