Title: Twisting the quantum Speaker: Prof. Charles W. Clark Joint Quantum Institute, National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Maryland College Park, Maryland, USA Time and Location: Thursday, March 3, 2016 2:00 pm, Seminar room pond, RISC, Hagenberg Abstract: Wave motions in nature were known to the ancients, and their mathematical expression in physics today is essentially the same as that first provided by d'Alembert and Euler in the mid-18th century. Yet it was only in 1992 that physicists managed to control a basic property of light waves: their ability to swirl about their axis of propagation. During the past 10 years such techniques of control have also been implemented in atoms, electrons and neutrons. I will present a simple description of these phenomena suited for mathematicians, emphasizing basic properties of the wave equation and the role of special functions, and showing how these are applied in our recent work on twisting neutron waves.* *C. W. Clark, et al., Nature 525, 504 (2015)