Talks

The black body nature of the first acoustic peak of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) was tested using foreground reduced WMAP 5-year data, by producing subtraction maps between pairs of cosmological bands, viz. the Q, V, and W bands, for masked sky areas that avoid the Galactic disk. The resulting maps revealed a non black body signal that has three main properties. (a) It fluctuates on the degree scale preferentially in one half of the sky, producing an extra {\it random} noise there of amplitude $\approx$ 3.5 $\mu$K, which is $\gtrsim$ 10 $\sigma$ above the pixel noise even after beam size differences between bands are taken into account. (b) The signal exhibits large scale asymmetry in the form of a dipole ($\approx$ 3 $\mu$K) in the Q-V and Q-W maps; and (c) a quadrupole ($\approx$ 1.5 $\mu$K) in the Q-V, Q-W, and V-W maps. While (b) is due most probably to cross-band calibration residuals of the CMB COBE dipole, the amplitude of (c) is well beyond systematics of the kind, and in any case no {\it a priori} quadrupole in the CMB exists to leave behind such a residual. The axes of symmetry of (a), (b), and (c) are tilted towards the same general direction of the ecliptic plane. This strongly suggests that foreground emission contaminates the CMB signatures at the 4 -- 5 % level even on the angular scale of the first acoustic peak.

We give a mathematical framework to describe the evolution of quantum systems subject to finitely many interactions with classical apparatuus and with each other. The systems in question may be composed of distinct, spatially separated subsystems which evolve independently, but may also interact. The evolution is coded in a mathematical structure in such a way that the properties of causality, covariance and entanglement are faithfully represented. The key to this scheme is to use a special family of spacelike slices -- we call them locative -- that are not so large as to permit acausal influences but large enough to capture nonlocal correlations. I will briefly describe how the dynamics can be described as a functor to a suitable category of Hilbert spaces and will also give some connections with logic.

We sketch some ideas about how higher-dimensional categories could be used to extend conventional quantum mechanics. The physical motivation comes from quantum field theory, for which higher-dimensional category theory is very relevant. We discuss how this new approach would affect familiar aspects of quantum theory, such as observables and the Copenhagen interpretation. Few solid answers will be given, but hopefully some discussion will be generated!

Tensor product is described in a family of categories that includes Set and Hilbert spaces. Such categories admit a "scalar" object which enables a definition of bi-arrows with two domains, generalizing functions of two variables. The tensor product is characterized by the expected universal property relating bi-arrows to arrows.

Astronomers believe our Universe began in a Big Bang, and is expanding around us. Brian Schmidt will describe the life of the Universe that we live in, and how astronomers have used observations to trace our Universe's history back more than 13 Billion years. With this data a puzzling picture has been pieced together where 96% of the Cosmos is made up of two mysterious substances, Dark Matter and Dark Energy. These two mysterious forms of matter are in a battle for domination of the Universe, and Schmidt will describe experiments that are monitoring the struggle between Dark Energy and Dark Matter, trying better understand these elusive pieces of our Universe, and predict the ultimate fate of the Cosmos.

This talk will present an overview of work done in the past decade on quantum state and process tomography, describing the basic notions at an introductory level, and arguing for a pragmatic approach for data reconstruction. The latest results include recent numerical comparison of different reconstruction techniques, aimed at answering the question: "is 'the best' the enemy of 'good enough'?"

The transformation of a narrow beam into a hollow cone when incident along the optic axis of a biaxial crystal, predicted by Hamilton in 1832, created a sensation when observed by Lloyd soon afterwards. It was the first application of his concept of phase space, and the prototype of the conical intersections and fermionic sign changes that now pervade physics and chemistry. But the fine structure of the bright cone contains many subtle features, slowly revealed by experiment, whose definitive explanation, involving new mathematical asymptotics, has been achieved only recently, along with definitive experimental test of the theory. Radically different phenomena arise when chirality and absorption are incorporated in addition to biaxiality.