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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Wednesday Sep 18, 2019Speaker(s):
Topology illuminates properties of geometric spaces which are independent of scale. Scale-independent features of physical systems play an important role, for example when deducing the large-scale behavior from a small-scale description. After an introduction to basic topological ideas, I will discuss two joint results with Mike Hopkins, one an application to string theory and the other an application to condensed matter theory.
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Wednesday Sep 04, 2019Speaker(s):
The Hubble constant remains one of the most important parameters in the cosmological model, setting the size and age scales of the Universe. Present uncertainties in the cosmological model including the nature of dark energy, the properties of neutrinos and the scale of departures from flat geometry can be constrained by measurements of the Hubble constant made to higher precision than was possible with the first generations of Hubble Telescope instruments.
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Wednesday May 29, 2019Speaker(s):
Computing has had many fundamental platform shifts in its history, and each came shrouded with mystery, hype, and dazzling potential: Alan Turing's universal machines, Doug Engelbart's Dynamic Knowledge Repository, J.C.R. Licklider's Intergalactic Network, the development of the internet, and all the waves of personal computers. More recently, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and now Web 3.0 have all been heralded with barely-working demos and baffling hype, only to quietly install and broadly distribute fundamental improvements to our everyday life, to our work, and to our society.
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Tuesday May 28, 2019Speaker(s):
Embezzlement of entanglement is the (impossible) task of producing an entangled state from a product state via a local change of basis, when a suitable catalytic entangled state is available. The possibility to approximate this task was first observed by van Dam and Hayden in 2002. Since then, the phenomenon is found to play crucial roles in many aspects of quantum information theory. In this colloquium, we will explain various methods to embezzlement entanglement and explore applications (such as an extension to approximately violate other conservation laws, a Bell inequality that canno
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Wednesday May 15, 2019Speaker(s):
Einstein is well known for his rejection of quantum mechanics in the form it emerged from the work of Heisenberg, Born and Schrodinger in 1926. Much less appreciated are the many seminal contributions he made to quantum theory prior to his final scientific verdict: that the theory was at best incomplete. In this talk I present an overview of Einstein’s many conceptual breakthroughs and place them in historical context. I argue that Einstein, much more than Planck, introduced the concept of quantization of energy in atomic mechanics.
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Friday Apr 26, 2019Speaker(s):
Gauge theories are fundamental to our understanding of interactions between the elementary constituents of matter as mediated by gauge bosons. However, computing the real-time dynamics in gauge theories is a notorious challenge for classical computational methods. In the spirit of Feynman's vision of a quantum simulator, this has recently stimulated theoretical effort to devise schemes for simulating such theories on engineered quantum-mechanical devices, with the difficulty that gauge invariance and the associated local conservation laws (Gauss laws) need to be implemented.
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Wednesday Apr 24, 2019Speaker(s):
The study of strongly interacting quantum matter has been at the forefront of condensed matter research in the last several decades. An independent development is the discovery of topological band insulators. In this talk I will describe phenomena that occur at the confluence of topology and strong interactions.
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Wednesday Apr 17, 2019Speaker(s):
Over the years, many rich ideas have been exchanged between particle theory and condensed matter theory, such as particle/hole theory, superconductivity and dynamical symmetry breaking, universality and critical phenomena.
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Wednesday Apr 10, 2019Speaker(s):
In some of the planet's most extreme environments scientists are constructing enormous detectors to study the very rare interactions produced by neutrinos. In particular, at South Pole Station Antarctica more than a cubic kilometer of the deep glacial ice has been instrumented to construct the world's largest neutrino detector to date: the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
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Tuesday Apr 09, 2019Speaker(s):
Despite intensive theoretical research for several decades, the theory of quantum gravity remains elusive. I will review the obstacles that prevent from reconciling the principles of general relativity with those of quantum mechanics. It is plausible that an eventual ultraviolet completion of general relativity will require sacrificing some of these principles. I will then focus on the class of theories where the abandoned property is local Lorentz invariance, replaced by an approximate anisotropic scaling symmetry in deep ultraviolet.
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