Colloquium

With a cosmic flight simulator, we'll take a scenic journey through space and time. After exploring our local Galactic neighborhood, we'll travel back 13.7 billion years to explore the Big Bang itself and how state-of-the-art measurements are transforming our understanding of our cosmic origin and ultimate fate. We then turn to the question of whether this can all be described purely mathematically, and discuss implications ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters and initial conditions to broader issues like parallel universes, simulations and and Goedel incompleteness.

Understanding magnetic reconnection is one of the major challenges of plasma physics. It plays an essential role in a wide range of physical systems such as stellar flares, accretion disks, active galactic nuclei, astrophysical dynamos and closer to home, intense magnetic energy releases in the Earth's magnetosphere. It is a phenomena which can be created in the laboratory. Magnetic reconnection occurs when oppositely directed components of field lines are broken and re-connected resulting in destruction of magnetic flux and topological rearrangement of magnetic field lines on very small scales. This can induce the release of magnetic energy on large scales resulting in high speed flows, heating and energetic particle production. There is a strong connection between formation of singular structures in flows and magnetic reconnection which I will discuss and tie this into some of the laboratory and natural physical systems under recent study. In addition to giving a contemporary overview on this subject I will discuss some open questions.

If spacetime is "quantized" (discrete), then any equation of motion compatible with the Lorentz transformations is necessarily non-local. I will present evidence that this sort of nonlocality survives on length scales much greater than Planckian, yielding for example a nonlocal effective wave-equation for a scalar field propagating on an underlying causal set. Nonlocality of our effective field theories may thus provide a characteristic signature of quantum gravity.

A full analysis of QCD, the fundamental theory of subnuclear structure and interactions, relies upon numerical simulations and the lattice approximation. After being stalled for almost 30 years, recent breakthroughs in lattice QCD allow us for the first time to analyze the low-energy structure of QCD nonperturbatively with few-percent precision. This talk will present a non-technical overview of the history leading up to these breakthroughs, and survey the wide array of applications that have been enabled by them. It will focus in particular on the impact of these new techniques on experiments that explore such areas as heavy-quark and Standard Model physics.

In this talk I describe a possible connection between quantum computing and Zeta functions of finite field equations that is inspired by the \'spectral approach\' to the Riemann conjecture. This time the assumption is that the zeros of such Zeta functions correspond to the eigenvalues of finite dimensional unitary operators of quantum mechanical systems. To model the desired quantum systems I use the notion of universal, efficient quantum computation. Using eigenvalue estimation, such quantum systems should be able to approximately count the number of solutions of the specific finite field equations with an accuracy that does not appear to be feasible classically. For certain equations (Fermat hypersurfaces) one can indeed model their Zeta functions with efficient quantum algorithms, which gives some evidence in favor of the proposal. In the case of equations that define elliptic curves, the corresponding unitary transformation is an SU(2) matrix. Hence for random elliptic curves one expects to see the kind of statistics predicted by random matrix theory. In the last part of the talk I discuss to which degree this expectation does indeed hold. Reference: arXiv:quant-ph/0405081

A nonrotating black hole placed in a tidal environment (that is, subjected to the gravitational interactions produced by other nearby bodies) is not described by the Schwarzschild solution to the Einstein field equations. Instead, its metric is given by a perturbed version of this exact solution, and the spacetime is no longer stationary nor spherically symmetric. After reviewing the situation in Newtonian theory, I shall describe how the metric of a tidally distorted black hole is calculated. Special attention will be placed on the general description of the tidal environment, the choice of a good coordinate system to describe the perturbed black hole, and the consequences on the structure of the event horizon

We have previously isolated and characterized a multipotent precursor cell (termed SKPs for SKin-derived Precursors) from both rodent and human skin, and have shown that these stem cells share many characteristics with a multipotent stem cell that is found in the embryo termed a neural crest stem cell. Here I will discuss our current work with regard to the basic biology of these stem cells, with a focus on the “what, where and why”, and on their therapeutic potential with specific regard to the nervous system.

I will explain how a quantum circuit together with measurement apparatuses and EPR sources can be fully verified without any reference to some other trusted set of quantum devices. Our main assumption is that the physical system we are working with consists of several identifiable sub-systems, on which we can apply some given gates locally. To achieve our goal we define the notions of simulation and equivalence. The concept of simulation refers to producing the correct probabilities when measuring physical systems. The notion of equivalence is used to enable the efficient testing of the composition of quantum operations. Unlike simulation, which refers to measured quantities (i.e., probabilities of outcomes), equivalence relates mathematical objects like states, subspaces or gates. Using these two concepts, we prove that if a system satisfies some simulation conditions, then it is equivalent to the one it is supposed to implement. In addition, with our formalism, we can show that these statements are robust, and the degree of robustness can be made explicit. Finally, we design a test for any quantum circuit whose complexity is linear in the number of gates and qubits, and polynomial in the required precision. Joint work with Frederic Magniez, Dominic Mayers and Harold Ollivier.

The nature of an unusual class of cosmic X-ray source, dubbed "Anomalous X-ray Pulsars," was a mystery since 1982 when the first example was discovered. In this talk, I will show the recent observational evidence that unambiguously links them with another equally exotic class of object, the explosive "Soft Gamma Repeaters." The evidence todate strongly supports the picture that both are "magnetars:" isolated young neutron stars having surface magnetic fields ~1000 times greater than those in conventional neutron stars.

Boundary conformal field theory finds applications not only to high energy physics but also to condensed matter systems containing quantum impurities, whose world lines can sometimes be modelled as boundaries of 2-dimensional space-time. This technique leads to exact predictions for the low temperature behaviour of gated semi-conductor quantum dot devices which have been recently confirmed experimentally. I will give a non-technical overview of both the theory and the experiments.

We discuss motivations, observational constraints and consequences of modifying the fundamental laws of gravity at large distances. Such modifications of gravity can be the reason for the observed late-time acceleration of the Universe, and can be differentiated from conventional dark energy via precision cosmology. The inevitable additional polarizations of graviton lead to observably large perihelion precession of the Lunar and Martian orbits. These theories also have potentially observable consequences at LHC .