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This is an introduction to background independent quantum theories of gravity, with a focus on loop quantum gravity and related approaches. Basic texts: -Quantum Gravity, by Carlo Rovelli, Cambridge University Press 2005 -Quantum gravityy with a positive cosmological constant, Lee Smolin, hep-th/0209079 -Invitation to loop quantum gravity, Lee Smolin, hep-th/0408048 -Gauge fields, knots and gravity, JC Baez, JP Muniain Prerequisites: -undergraduate quantum mechanics -basics of classical gauge field theories -basic general relativity -hamiltonian and lagrangian mechanics -basics of lie algebras

In this expository talk, I describe how "chaotic behavior" not only was discovered in the study of the Newtonian N-body problem, but also is responsible for several strange appearing motions. Then, a mathematical outline of the general evolution of the universe, under Newton's laws, is provided. No prior background in dynamics or the mathematics of the N-body problem is needed to follow this lecture

This is an introduction to background independent quantum theories of gravity, with a focus on loop quantum gravity and related approaches. Basic texts: -Quantum Gravity, by Carlo Rovelli, Cambridge University Press 2005 -Quantum gravityy with a positive cosmological constant, Lee Smolin, hep-th/0209079 -Invitation to loop quantum gravity, Lee Smolin, hep-th/0408048 -Gauge fields, knots and gravity, JC Baez, JP Muniain Prerequisites: -undergraduate quantum mechanics -basics of classical gauge field theories -basic general relativity -hamiltonian and lagrangian mechanics -basics of lie algebras

This is an introduction to background independent quantum theories of gravity, with a focus on loop quantum gravity and related approaches. Basic texts: -Quantum Gravity, by Carlo Rovelli, Cambridge University Press 2005 -Quantum gravityy with a positive cosmological constant, Lee Smolin, hep-th/0209079 -Invitation to loop quantum gravity, Lee Smolin, hep-th/0408048 -Gauge fields, knots and gravity, JC Baez, JP Muniain Prerequisites: -undergraduate quantum mechanics -basics of classical gauge field theories -basic general relativity -hamiltonian and lagrangian mechanics -basics of lie algebras

The amount of nonlocality in the GHZ state can be quantified by determining how much classical communication is required to bring a local-hidden-variable model into agreement with the predictions of quantum mechanics. It turns out that one bit suffices, and, of course, nothing less will do. I will discuss generalizations of this result to graph states and its relation to the stabilizer formalism.

The discovery of cosmic acceleration has generated tremendous excitement among researchers in fundamental physics and cosmology. Most experts agree that nothing short of a revolution will be required to fully integrate the observed cosmic acceleration (which many attribute to a mysterious "dark energy") with established physics. Currently this discovery is driving very exciting research in both the theoretical and observational domain. I will present two of these topics that particularly interest me: 1) Dark Energy and Cosmic Equilibrium: How a cosmological constant could make the universe look like a box of gas (and what this could mean for cosmology). 2) Probes of Dark Energy: A host of new probes promise to tell us more about dark energy, but what do we really want to know?

Strongly correlated many-body systems are often formulated as gauge theories where gauge field plays a role of Lagrangian multiplier and fundamental matter field represents a fractional degree of freedom which carries only a fractional quantum number of microscopic particle. Although the fractional particles are prone to be confined at high energy owing to an infinite bare gauge coupling, they can emerge as deconfined degrees of freedom at low/intermediate energy scales as the gauge coupling is renormalized to a finite value by fluctuating matter fields. The resulting dynamics of the gauge field crucially depends on the number and the dynamics of the matter fields. In this talk, I will discuss how a change in the dynamics of matter fields affects the dynamics of gauge field. I will consider a field theory where a 2+1D compact U(1) gauge field is coupled to a large number of fundamental matter fields with an infinite bare gauge coupling and the matter fields are, in turn, subject to an additional strong interaction. This field theory can be realized as a low energy theory of a D-brane configuration and nonperturbative effects of the strong interaction can be studied from the AdS/CFT correspondence. Using the dual gravity theory, I will discuss how the strong interaction between matter fields can drastically modify the dynamics of the U(1) gauge field. Our result suggests that even an unstable brane configuration can define a consistent field theory once tachyonic modes are frozen.

Quantum information methods have been recently used for studying the properties of ground state entanglement in several many body and field theory systems. We will discuss a thought experiment wherein entanglement can be extracted from the vacuum of a relativistic field theory into a pair of arbitrarily spatially separated atoms. In order to simulate the detection process, we will consider the ground state of a linear chain of cooled trapped ions, and discuss a scheme for detecting the entanglement between the ion's motional degrees of freedom.