# Colloquium

This series covers all areas of research at Perimeter Institute, as well as those outside of PI's scope.

## Seminar Series Events/Videos

Currently there are no upcoming talks in this series.

## Using Large-Scale Structure and CMB Observations to Probe the Properties of Dark Energy

Wednesday May 27, 2009
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Cosmologists are struggling to understand why the expansion rate of our universe is now accelerating. There are two sets of explanations for this remarkable observation: dark energy fills space or general relativity fails on cosmological scales. If dark energy is the solution to the cosmic acceleration problem, then the logarithmic growth rate of structure $dlnG/dlna = \Omega^\gamma$, where $\Omega$ is the matter density independent of scale in a dark matter plus dark energy model.

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## Growing, Jamming and Changing Phase

Wednesday May 20, 2009
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Key notions from statistical physics, such as "phase transitions" and "critical phenomena", are providing important insights in fields ranging from computer science to probability theory to epidemiology. Underlying many of the advances is the study of phase transitions on models of networks. Starting from the classic ideas of Erdos and Renyi, recent attempts to control and manipulate the nature of the phase transition in network connectivity will be discussed.

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## Where quantum meets logic, . . . in a world of pictures!

Wednesday Apr 29, 2009
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Yes, that's indeed where it happens. These pictures are not ordinary pictures but come with category-theoretic algebraic semantics, support automated reasoning and design of protocols, and match perfectly the developments in important areas of mathematics such as representation theory, proof theory, TQFT & GR, knot theory etc. More concretely, we report on the progress in a research program that aims to capture logical structures within quantum phenomena and quantum informatic tasks in purely diagrammatic terms.

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## Integrability in gauge/string dualities

Monday Apr 27, 2009
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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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## Qu-transitions. Phase transitions in the quantum era.

Wednesday Apr 22, 2009
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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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## Untangling entanglement: An observer-dependent perspective

Wednesday Apr 08, 2009
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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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## Making a Splash--Breaking a Neck, The Making of Complexity in Physical Systems

Wednesday Mar 25, 2009
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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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## The Multiverse Of String Theory, The Measure Problem, And The Cosmological Constant

Wednesday Mar 18, 2009
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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.

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## Quantum graphity: a model of emergent locality in quantum gravity

Wednesday Mar 11, 2009
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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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## Evidence for the Black Hole Event Horizon

Wednesday Feb 18, 2009
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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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