News

The Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute, Howard Burton, has recently launched a new venture called Ideas Roadshow, a multimedia magazine in which Burton, as host and CEO, conducts in-depth interviews with a wide variety of leading experts.

Dr. Neil Turok has been appointed to a second term as Director. He will also become the inaugural Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Niels Bohr Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute.

Perimeter Institute is pleased to announce its first appointments to the Emmy Noether Fellows program, Claudia de Rham and Sara Pasquetti.

Perimeter Institute Director Neil Turok was recently honoured by the University of Guelph as part of their three-day winter convocation.

Might we someday predict – and then carefully observe – the birth of a black hole? Perimeter Faculty member Luis Lehner thinks it’s possible.

Perimeter Associate Faculty member Maxim Pospelov and his collaborators say our solar system might be crashing through bubble after bubble in a foamy cosmos – and we might be able to detect bubble walls as we pass through them.

The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) in India is commemorating 50 years of creative science with a Golden Jubilee.  The celebration, which includes a special conference and public events, will be held from January 2nd to 4th, 2013.

2012 has been a good year for Perimeter Institute’s Distinguished Visiting Research Chairs (DVRC) program (formerly known as the DRC program). Four eminent scientists – Adrian Kent (University of Cambridge), Ramesh Narayan (Harvard University), Ashvin Vishwanath (University of California, Berkeley), and Steven White (University of California, Irvine) – have accepted DVRC appointments and an additional 11 have renewed their terms through 2015.

Davide Gaiotto, a Perimeter faculty member, and Stephen Hawking, a Perimeter Distinguished Visiting Research Chair, have both been awarded prizes from the Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation. Gaiotto has won a $100,000 New Horizons in Physics Prize for emerging work as a young researcher, and Stephen Hawking was awarded a $3 million Special Fundamental Physics Prize for his work on black holes.

Paige Murphy from Campbell River, British Columbia is the 2012 winner of the Luke Santi Memorial Award for Student Achievement, presented by Perimeter Institute.

A strange thing about black holes: they shine.

The current issue of Science Express, the online advance publication of the journal, features a paper by the Event Horizon telescope team – a collaboration which includes Perimeter Associate Faculty member Avery Broderick – that may shed light on the origin of the bright jets given off by some black holes. In a world first, the team has been able to look at a distant black hole and resolve the area where its jets are launched from. This is the first empirical evidence to support the connection between black hole spin and black hole jets that has been long suspected on theoretical grounds.