The long-lived noble-gas isotope 81Kr is the ideal tracer for water and ice with ages of 105 - 106 years, a range beyond the reach of 14C. 81Kr-dating, a concept pursued over the past five decades, is finally available to the earth science community at large. This is made possible by the development of the Atom Trap Trace Analysis (ATTA) method, in which individual atoms of the desired isotope are captured and detected. ATTA possesses superior selectivity, and is thus far used to analyze the environmental radioactive isotopes 81Kr, 85Kr, and 39Ar. These three isotopes have extremely low isotopic abundances in the range of 10-17 to 10-11, and cover a wide range of ages and applications. In collaboration with earth scientists, we are dating groundwater and mapping its flow in major aquifers around the world. We are also dating old ice from the deep ice cores of Antarctica, Greenland, and the Tibetan Plateau. For an update on this worldwide effort, please google “ATTA Primer”.

The Sun, as all the other stars, is fueled for most of its life by the fusion of hydrogen into helium taking place in its core. Neutrinos produced in such reactions are the only direct probe to the innermost part of our star and real time messengers of its engine. Decades of experimental and phenomenological efforts allowed us to study in detail the driving energy production mechanism in the Sun, the proton-proton chain, which is responsible for ~99% of the Sun luminosity. The fusion processes accounting for the remaining 1% are believed to be catalyzed by the presence of Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen (CNO-cycle) in the Sun interior, but a direct evidence of the occurrence of such mechanism was still missing. After years-long efforts, the Borexino experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratories has recently reported the first direct observation of solar neutrinos produced in the CNO-cycle. In this talk I will present the Borexino findings and I will discuss the importance of CNO neutrinos for astrophysics and for our understanding of the Sun, particularly in connection to its chemical composition.

Over the past few decades, accelerators have been the traditional venue for new particle discoveries – but the paradigm is shifting. Accelerator energies are likely to remain on a plateau for some time, while atomic physics & precision measurement are in a remarkable period of progress. Some limits have advanced by a factor of 100 in less than 10 years, and laser technologies are being refined to exquisite levels. New Physics searches are already an established avenue in the atomic physics field; from atomic parity violation, to EDM searches, to equivalence principle tests. Happily, many of these platforms are well-suited to do double-duty as broadband dark matter searches. In this talk, I will explain the basics of our unique trapped-ion electron EDM search, how we used our recent data to constrain the gluon to axion-like particle coupling over seven mass decades, and how we solved some important methodological issues along the way.

Recent technological advances have put us at the brink of having access to small scale quantum computers capable of solving problems that cannot be tackled with classical computers. A limited number of algorithms have been proposed and their relevance to real world problems is a subject of active investigation. Solving problems relevant to chemistry are expected to be the first successful applications of quantum computers. In this talk, I will discuss a particular problem that can be solved efficiently on quantum computers: model inference for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. I will give a broad introduction to quantum computing and NMR metabolomics assuming no prior knowledge of the subject.