Talks

Tamara Davis The last decade of astrophysics has shown more than ever before that cosmology can teach us about the nuts-and-bolts of basic physics. This has been driven by the discovery of the accelerating universe (dark energy) --- the theories being proposed to explain dark energy often invoke new physics such as brane-worlds arising from fledgling models of quantum-gravity. It has become evident that the large timescales and spatial-scales probed by cosmology allow us to learn about fundamental physics in a way inaccessible to any earth-bound experiment. This talk will review my work as part of the ESSENCE and SDSS supernova surveys, and the WiggleZ Baryon Acoustic Oscillation survey, to test new fundamental physics. I'll present the latest data and discuss how the cosmological constraints will be improved in the future with more data, different types of data, and improved analysis techniques.

I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly.

I will review some recent advances on the line of deriving quantum field theory from pure quantum information processing. The general idea is that there is only Quantum Theory (without quantization rules), and the whole Physics---including space-time and relativity---is emergent from the processing. And, since Quantum Theory itself is made with purely informational principles, the whole Physics must be reformulated in information-theoretical terms. Here's the TOC of the talk: a) Very short review of the informational axiomatization of Quantum Theory; b) How space-time and relativistic covariance emerge from the quantum computation; c) Special relativity without space: other ideas; d) Dirac equation derived as information flow (without the need of Lorentz covariance); e) Information-theoretical meaning of inertial mass and Planck constant; f) Observable consequences (at the Planck scale?); h) What about Gravity? Three alternatives as a start for a brainstorming.

Five decades ago, Aharonov and Bohm illustrated the indispensable role of the vector potential in quantum dynamics by showing (theoretically) that scattering electrons around a solenoid, no matter how thin, would give rise to a non-trivial cross section that had a periodic dependence on the product of charge and total magnetic flux. (This periodic dependence is due to the topological nature of the interaction.) We extend the Aharonov-Bohm analysis to the field theoretic domain: starting with the quantum vacuum (with zero particles) we compute explicitly the rate of production of electrically charged particle-antiparticle pairs induced by shaking a solenoid at some fixed frequency. (This body of work can be found in arXiv: 0911.0682 and 1003.0674.) Part II: The N-Body Problem in General Relativity from Perturbative QFT In the second portion of the talk, I will describe how one may use methods usually associated with perturbative quantum field theory to develop what is commonly known as the post-Newtonian program in General Relativity -- the weak field, non-relativistic, gravitational dynamics of compact astrophysical objects. The 2 body aspect of the problem is a large industry by now, driven by the need to model the gravitational waves expected from compact astrophysical binaries. I will discuss my efforts to generalize these calculations to the N-body case. (This work can be found in arXiv: 0812.0012.)

In this talk I will discuss the applications of the gauge/gravity duality to the strongly coupled quark gluon plasma, focusing in particular on the role of the shear viscosity to entropy ratio. It has been argued that the lower bound on the shear viscosity to entropy density in strongly coupled plasmas can be understood in terms of microcausality violation in the dual gravitational description. However, since the transport properties of the system characterize its infrared dynamics, while the causality of the theory is determined by its ultraviolet behavior, the link between the viscosity bound and microcausality should not be applicable in theories that undergo low temperature phase transitions. I will discuss an explicit holographic model confirming this fact, in which there is a ``decoupling'' of UV from IR physics.