Colloquium
This series covers all areas of research at Perimeter Institute, as well as those outside of PI's scope.
Seminar Series Events/Videos
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Monday Apr 27, 2009Speaker(s):
Integrability in gauge/string dualities will be reviewed in a broad perspective with a particular emphasis on the recently proposed equations describing the full planar spectrum of anomalous dimensions in AdS/CFT [N.Gromov, V.Kazakov, PV].
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Wednesday Apr 22, 2009Speaker(s):
Physicists are often so awestruck by the lofty achievements of the past, we end up thinking all the big stuff is done, which blinds us to the revolutions ahead. We are still firmly in the throes of the quantum revolution that began a hundred years ago. Quantum gravity, quantum computers, qu-bits and quantum phase transitions, are manifestations of this ongoing revolution. Nowhere is this more so, than in the evolution of our understanding of the collective properties of quantum matter.
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Wednesday Apr 08, 2009Speaker(s):
Entanglement is one of the most fundamental and yet most elusive properties of quantum mechanics. Not only does entanglement play a central role in quantum information science, it also provides an increasingly prominent bridging notion across different subfields of Physics --- including quantum foundations, quantum gravity, quantum statistical mechanics, and beyond. Arguably, the property of a state being entangled or not is by no means unambiguously defined.
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Wednesday Mar 25, 2009Speaker(s):
The fundamental laws of physics are very simple. The world about us is very complex. Living things are very complex indeed. This complexity has led some thinkers to suggest that living things are not the outcome of physical law but instead the creation of a designer. Here I examine how complexity is produced naturally in fluids.
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Wednesday Mar 18, 2009Speaker(s):
The vacuum landscape of string theory can solve the cosmological constant problem, explaining why the energy of empty space is observed to be at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than several known contributions to it. It leads to a 'multiverse' in which every type of vacuum is produced infinitely many times, and of which we have observed but a tiny fraction. This conceptual revolution has raised tremendous challenges in particle physics and cosmology. To understand the low-energy physics we observe, and to test the theory, we will need novel statistical tools and effective theories.
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Wednesday Mar 11, 2009Speaker(s):
Quantum graphity is a background independent condensed matter model for emergent locality, spatial geometry and matter in quantum gravity. The states of the system are given by bosonic degrees of freedom on a dynamical graph on N vertices. At high energy, the graph is the complete graph on N vertices and the physics is invariant under the full symmetric group acting on the vertices and highly non-local. The ground state dynamically breaks the permutation symmetry to translations and rotations. In this phase the system is ordered, low-dimensional and local.
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Wednesday Feb 18, 2009Speaker(s):
Astronomers have discovered many candidate black holes in the universe and have studied their properties in ever-increasing detail. Over the last decade, a few groups have developed observational tests for the presence of event horizons in candidate black holes. The talk will discuss one of these tests, which indicates that the supermassive black hole at the center of our Galaxy must have a horizon.
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Wednesday Feb 11, 2009Speaker(s):
To interface photons with solid-state devices, we investigated the coupling of optically active quantum dots with optical micro- and nano-cavities. Initial experimental progress have led to the unexpected observation of ultra low threshold lasing of a photonic crystal defect mode cavity embedded with only 1 to 3 InAs self-assembled quantum dots as gain medium. Photon correlation measurements confirmed the transition from a thermal light source to a coherent light source.
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Wednesday Jan 21, 2009Speaker(s):
In the 60’s, the analytic S-matrix program was developed in an attempt to describe the strong interactions – at the time, this was a theory of massive particles like pions. The S-matrix is an object that encodes the information of the probability of producing a certain set of final particles from a given set of initial particles. Eventually, the S-matrix program was replaced by Quantum Field Theory and in particular by Quantum Chromo Dynamics as the description of the strong interactions. In recent years there has been a resurrection of the S-matrix paradigm.
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Wednesday Jan 14, 2009Speaker(s):
The PAMELA satellite-borne experiment was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome on the 15th of June 2006. It has been collecting data since July 2006. The instrument is composed of a silicon-microstrip magnetic spectrometer, a time-of-flight system, a silicon-tungsten electromagnetic calorimeter, an anticoincidence system, a shower tail counter scintillator and a neutron detector. The primary scientific goal is the measurement of the antiproton and positron energy spectrum in order to search for exotic sources, such as dark matter particle annihilations.
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