Pint of Science Tuesday Göteborg

Imagine a crime scene where nothing was stolen and no fingerprints were found — but the furniture has clearly been moved. Something was there, but left almost no trace. This is exactly the puzzle physicists face in certain special materials, where the atomic structure deforms before any magnetization sets in — and existing explanations only told part of the story, until now. The culprit: tiny magnets, called dipoles, arranging themselves into pairs that point in opposite directions — a quadrupole. These pairs cancel each other out so perfectly that no matter how many are present, they leave no measurable magnetic trace. Just one silent witness remains: the deformation of the atomic structure itself. A nearly perfect crime.

Biography:
Finja Tietjen is doing her PhD in Physics at Chalmers, where she studies how order emerges from chaos on a quantum level. Over the past years, she has solved endless equations and found that collaboration wins over competition even on the smallest scale. Beyond her equations, she is passionate about showing the beauty of the abstract quantum world to a broader audience by sharing the little stories she sees between electrons and atoms.

When you stream a video online, encryption is supposed to protect your privacy. But surprisingly, subtle patterns in network traffic can still reveal what someone is watching — even without breaking encryption! This talk explores how this happens, why it matters for everyday users, and what can be done to better protect online privacy in the age of mass streaming.

Biography:
Romaric Duvignau is an Associate Professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, working in distributed computing and systems. Prof. Duvignau's research focuses on understanding and improving the efficiency, security, privacy, and reliability of large-scale digital infrastructures including streaming platforms and other online services.