The bright side of matter

In colour theory, we learn that combining colours creates new ones: mixing red and blue produces purple, and combining pigments can generate a wide range of different shades.
But what if light itself could do the mixing?
In nonlinear optics, this is exactly what happens. When light becomes intense enough, it no longer just passes through matter, it interacts with it in a fundamentally different way. Colours are no longer simply revealed or combined: they are generated. New frequencies emerge, new colours appear, and light begins to transform itself.
This talk introduces nonlinear optics, a field that explores how “more light” can mean not just brighter light, but entirely new colours, and a fundamentally different way in which light behaves.

Have you ever dreamed of shrinking down to the size of a particle to explore the quantum world from up close? Imagine jumping between the atoms of a crystal, dodging the jolt of an electron or sunbathing under the warmth of a single photon. We can’t downsize humans yet, but we’ve learned to send nano-explorers in our place! Electrons are small enough to navigate the quantum wilderness and fast enough to capture its action. Join us to discover how Ultrafast Electron Microscopy captures the infinitesimally small and its evolution in time.

Science and art are often presented as fundamentally different fields, with distinct goals and methods. Yet their histories are deeply intertwined, and their practices share more common ground than is often acknowledged. Despite this, art is frequently positioned in the service of science: reduced to visualization, communication, or aesthetic enhancement. In this talk, we challenge that model and argue instead for an equal handshake, empathy and reinforcement of positive feedback loops between the fields as the way forward.