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The aim of the Hammers & Nails climate workshop was to give researchers at Perimeter a unique opportunity to interact with invited experts from diverse fields related to climate, energy and biodiversity. The first half of the workshop was dedicated to short research pitches, where both PI researchers as well as invited guests from the Math4Climate network (including e.g. Waterloo Center for Innovation and Complexity, UW's Climate Institute, Energy Institute, Water Institute) could present their hammers & nails. Nails refers to open challenges within climate, energy & biodiversity research. Hammers refers to methods used by PI researchers in their daily work (e.g. causal inference, techniques in algebraic topology, strong gravity simulations etc.). The second half of the workshop built on these pitches through informal group discussions. Conversations from the workshop may be continued in the future through informal lunches and reading groups.

The aim of the Hammers & Nails climate workshop was to give researchers at Perimeter a unique opportunity to interact with invited experts from diverse fields related to climate, energy and biodiversity. The first half of the workshop was dedicated to short research pitches, where both PI researchers as well as invited guests from the Math4Climate network (including e.g. Waterloo Center for Innovation and Complexity, UW's Climate Institute, Energy Institute, Water Institute) could present their hammers & nails. Nails refers to open challenges within climate, energy & biodiversity research. Hammers refers to methods used by PI researchers in their daily work (e.g. causal inference, techniques in algebraic topology, strong gravity simulations etc.). The second half of the workshop built on these pitches through informal group discussions. Conversations from the workshop may be continued in the future through informal lunches and reading groups.

Complementing the spectacular breakthroughs in gravitational wave and multi-messenger astronomy, advancements in our theoretical understanding and modelling of the strong gravity are essential to apprehending the nonlinear dynamics of spacetime, and to unlocking the full potential of the observations. I will illustrate the scope of new physics that might be probed by black holes, neutron stars, and other such systems, including testing general relativity and strong gravity signatures of new particles, and describe some recent developments that allow for uncovering novel phenomena and making detailed predictions in this regime.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96180256322?pwd=LzEyd3ZBWGdZeDR6MjB1dGpLWFRpUT09

There are fascinating new insights we could achieve if we succeeded in connecting quantum gravity to particle physics in the visible and the dark universe. However, making such a connection is challenging, because the typical scale of quantum gravity is believed to be far from the typical scales in particle physics. I will exploit lever arms that could make it possible to bridge this gap in scales.  To provide concrete examples for these ideas, I will review recent results on the proton lifetime in quantum gravity, the effects of asymptotically safe quantum gravity on properties of Standard Model matter and the effects of asymptotically safe quantum gravity on simple models of dark energy and dark matter.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96545839038?pwd=UG1IVzJPWUZGa2ovOFhzdHBhOFhOdz09

Tensor Processing Units are application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) built by Google to run large-scale machine learning (ML) workloads (e.g. AlphaFold). They excel at matrix multiplications, and hence can be repurposed for applications beyond ML. In this talk I will explain how TPUs can be leveraged to run large-scale density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculations at unprecedented size and accuracy. DMRG is a powerful tensor network algorithm originally applied to computing ground-states and low-lying excited states of strongly correlated, low-dimensional quantum systems. For certain systems, like one-dimensional gapped or quantum critical Hamiltonians, or small, strongly correlated molecules, it has today become the gold standard method for computing e.g. ground-state properties. Using a TPUv3-pod, we ran large-scale DMRG simulations for a system of 100 spinless fermions, and optimized matrix product state wave functions with a bond dimension of more than 65000 (a parameter space with more than 600 billion parameters). Our results clearly indicate that hardware accelerator platforms like Google's latest TPU versions or NVIDIAs DGX systems are ideally suited to scale tensor network algorithms to sizes that are beyond capabilities of traditional HPC architectures.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99337818378?pwd=SGZvdFFValJQaDNMQ0U1YnJ6NU1FQT09

Schrodinger's thought experiment famously illustrates the dramatic effect of measuring a quantum state. The resulting wave function collapse is often thought to make states more classical and familiar. However, in this colloquium, we explore how measurements can be used as a chisel to efficiently build exotic forms of quantum entanglement. We focus on topological states of matter, whose quasiparticles exhibit generalized 'anyonic' exchange statistics with potential relevance to quantum computation. We use these ideas to experimentally realize the first controlled realization of non-Abelian anyons, which can remember the sequence in which they are exchanged. The smoking gun signature of this experiment is inspired by the coat of arms of the House of Borromeo.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98167813390?pwd=aG5vcklVZzBWT1BRSjI4RVRtbDhBUT09

We explore how measurements and unitary feedback can generate distinct phases of matter from a given resource state, with a specific focus on the toric code in two dimensions. First, we map random Pauli measurements on the toric code to a classical loop model with crossings, and we show how measurement-induced entanglement exactly maps to watermelon correlators of the loop model.  Then, we consider measuring all but a 1d boundary of qubits, and we map this setup to hybrid circuits in 1+1 dimensions.  In particular, we find that varying the probabilities of different Pauli measurements can drive phase transitions in the unmeasured boundary between phases with different orders and entanglement scaling, corresponding to short and long loop phases in the classical model.  Finally, by utilizing single-site boundary unitaries conditioned on the bulk measurement outcomes, we generate mixed state ordered phases and transitions that can be experimentally diagnosed with linear observables. Our findings showcase the potential of measurement-based quantum computing setups in producing and manipulating phases of matter.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99159680593?pwd=V29wRit6T3NlSjZGTDEvTnRFcTlrUT09

The classical spacetime manifold of general relativity disappears in quantum gravity, with different research programs suggesting a variety of alternatives in its place. As an illustration of how philosophers might contribute to an interdisciplinary project in quantum gravity, I will give an overview of recent philosophical debates regarding how classical spacetime "emerges."  I will criticize some philosophers as granting too much weight to the intuition that a coherent physical theory must describe objects as located in space and time.  I will further argue, based in part on historical episodes, that an account of emergence needs to recover the structural features of classical GR responsible for its empirical success.  This is more demanding than it might at first appear, although the details of recovery will differ significantly among different approaches to quantum gravity.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98331676824?pwd=VTNOakMxWWUzT2ZFZFYwYzBRdWxBUT09

Polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) such as acenes have long been studied due to its interesting optical properties and low singlet triplet gaps. Earlier studies have already noticed that use of complete valence active space is imperative to the understanding of its qualitative and quantitative properties. Since complete active space based methods cannot be applied to such large active spaces, we have used density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) based approaches. Further small modification to the PAH topology shows interesting new phases of behaviour in its optical gaps. We have understood the effect of these effects based on spin frustration due to the presence of odd membered rings. In this talk, I will discuss these observations from molecular and model Hamiltonian perspectives.Further developments based on artificial neural network based configuration interaction for strongly correlated systems will also be discussed.5  The similarities between the ANNs and the MPS wavefunctions will be leveraged for 2D systems.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/92159136836?pwd=ZFJBcXZ3R3czSUcxcThOci9ueStBZz09

I will describe a construction that allows to understand spinors in an arbitrary number of dimensions, with arbitrary signature. I will describe what pure spinors are, and how in low dimensions all spinors are pure. The first impure spinors arise in 8 dimensions, and "purest" impure spinors are octonions. I will describe how a spinor in an arbitrary dimension defines a set of geometric structures. The easiest example of this is how a pure spinor defines a complex structure. As one increases the dimension, the types of geometric structures that are described by spinors become more and more exotic. If time permits, I will describe some examples in 14 and 16 dimensions. Almost nothing is known about spinors in dimension beyond 16.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94776499052?pwd=RGVURlRnaEx6REJwVE10VXhqa1Q5Zz09

Nils Siemonsen, Perimeter Institute & University of Waterloo

Dark Photon Superradiance

Gravitational and electromagnetic signatures of black hole superradiance are a unique probe of ultralight particles that are weakly-coupled to ordinary matter. Considering the lowest-order interactions one can write down for spin-1 dark photons, the kinetic mixing, a dark photon superradiance cloud sources a rotating visible electromagnetic field. A pair production cascade ensues in the superradiance cloud, resulting a turbulent plasma with strong electromagnetic emissions. The emission is expected to have a significant X-ray component and to potentially be periodic, with period set by the dark photon mass. The luminosity is comparable to the brightest X-ray sources in the Universe, allowing for searches at distances of up to hundreds of Mpc with existing telescopes. Therefore, multi-messenger search campaigns are sensitive to large parts of unexplored beyond the Standard Model parameter space.

Bruno Torres, Perimeter Institute & University of Waterloo

Optimal coupling for local entanglement extraction from a quantum field

The entanglement structure of quantum fields is of central importance in various aspects of the connection between spacetime geometry and quantum field theory. However, it is challenging to quantify entanglement between complementary regions of a quantum field theory due to the formally infinite amount of entanglement present at short distances. We present an operationally-motivated way of analyzing entanglement in a QFT by considering the entanglement which can be transferred to a set of local probes coupled to the field. In particular, using a lattice approximation to the field theory, we show how to optimize the coupling of the local probes with the field in a given region to most accurately capture the original entanglement present between that region and its complement. This coupling prescription establishes a bound on the entanglement between complementary regions that can be extracted to probes with finitely many degrees of freedom.