Unveiling The Veil: Self-Representation in Contemporary Muslim Female Art

Contemporary Muslim feminist artists, such as Cigdem Aydemir, Sarah Maple and Shirin Neshat, tackle the representation and misrepresentation of Muslim women, within both patriarchal Muslim cultures and the Islamophobic Global North. As this thesis shows, such artists often use the veil to perform Muslim womanhood and their unveiled bodies to claim agency both in and outside of Islamic countries. This practice-led research MFA, developed by Amber Hammad, positions itself in the field of veiling and unveiling Muslim woman’s bodies, building on the work of the aforementioned artists. Drawing on Hammad’s experiences of living in Pakistan and Australia, it analyses the politics of performing Muslim womanhood from a feminist standpoint, utilising strategies of the performance lecture and video art in particular. In the video work The Nude Dupatta — A Performance Lecture (2021) Hammad draws on the work of Hito Steyerl on the politics of images and Andrea Fraser’s work on gendered institutional critique to galvanise her agency as a Muslim female artist. In particular, the work examines the female nude in Islamic art history. In Lower the Gaze: Manuscript Page from خاتون نامه Khatoon Nama #1 (2021) Hammad builds on Shahzia Sikander’s techniques of animation and appropriation and Sara Ahmed’s intersectional feminist theories to connect ideas of visibility and invisibility with the sounds of the Quranic phrase “lower your gaze.” Through these works Hammad expands understandings of Muslim female artists’ engagements with hypervisibility and the politics of veiling

Panchromatic Cross-Conjugated π-Bridge NIR Dyes for DSCs

Four organic sensitizers incorporating a cross-conjugated cyclopenta[2,1-b:3,4-b′]dithiophene (CPDT) π-bridge have been synthesized. As a result of molecular engineering, broad high energy bands and red shifted absorption maxima and onset is observed relative to a benchmark analogue (C218) using a non-cross-conjugated CPDT π-bridge. The use of a cross-conjugated bridge allows a new strategy for tuning dye energetics and introduction of increased absorption uniformity by adding additional high-energy absorption bands. These dyes show solar-to-electric conversion up to 800 nm with one derivative exceeding the performance of C218 under identical conditions

Searching for long-lived particles beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider

International audienceParticles beyond the Standard Model (SM) can generically have lifetimes that are long compared to SM particles at the weak scale. When produced at experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, these long-lived particles (LLPs) can decay far from the interaction vertex of the primary proton–proton collision. Such LLP signatures are distinct from those of promptly decaying particles that are targeted by the majority of searches for new physics at the LHC, often requiring customized techniques to identify, for example, significantly displaced decay vertices, tracks with atypical properties, and short track segments. Given their non-standard nature, a comprehensive overview of LLP signatures at the LHC is beneficial to ensure that possible avenues of the discovery of new physics are not overlooked. Here we report on the joint work of a community of theorists and experimentalists with the ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb experiments—as well as those working on dedicated experiments such as MoEDAL, milliQan, MATHUSLA, CODEX-b, and FASER—to survey the current state of LLP searches at the LHC, and to chart a path for the development of LLP searches into the future, both in the upcoming Run 3 and at the high-luminosity LHC. The work is organized around the current and future potential capabilities of LHC experiments to generally discover new LLPs, and takes a signature-based approach to surveying classes of models that give rise to LLPs rather than emphasizing any particular theory motivation. We develop a set of simplified models; assess the coverage of current searches; document known, often unexpected backgrounds; explore the capabilities of proposed detector upgrades; provide recommendations for the presentation of search results; and look towards the newest frontiers, namely high-multiplicity ‘dark showers’, highlighting opportunities for expanding the LHC reach for these signals