Scientific Series

Spins play a major role in the strong-field dynamics of
black-hole binaries and their gravitational-wave emission. By detecting spin
effects in the waveforms, existing and future gravitational-wave detectors
therefore provide a natural way to test gravity in strong-field, highly
dynamical regimes.

In the first part of my talk, I will show that the
inclusion of the spins in the gravitational templates for future space-based
detectors will permit testing scenarios for the formation and cosmological
evolution of supermassive black holes, and possibly shed light on models of
galaxy formation. In the second part, I will show that the effective-one-body
(EOB) model provides an efficient way to account for spin effects in both the
dynamics and waveforms, by combining information from post-Newtonian theory,
the self-force formalism, and numerical-relativity simulations.

While quantum measurement remains the central philosophical conundrum of quantum mechanics, it has recently grown into a respectable (read: experimental!) discipline as well.  New perspectives on measurement have grown  out of new technological possibilities, but also out of
attempts to design systems for quantum information processing, which promise to be exponentially more powerful than any possible classical computer.  I will try to give a flavour about some of these perspectives, focussing largely on a particular paradigm known as "weak measurement."
Weak measurement is a natural extension of a pragmatic view of what it means to measure something about a quantum system, yet leads to some rather surprising results.  I will describe a few examples of our recent experiments using weak measurement to probe fundamental issues in  uantum mechanics such as what the minimum disturbance due to a quantum measurement is.  I will also argue that there are regimes in which weak measurement offers a practical advantage for sensitive measurements.  

The ground-based gravitational-wave telescopes LIGO and Virgo approach the era of first detections.  Gravitational-wave observations will provide a unique probe for exploring strong-field general relativity and compact-binary astrophysics.  In this talk, I describe recent predictions regarding the distributions of black-hole and neutron-star binary mergers, and progress on solving the inverse problem of turning gravitational-wave observations into astrophysical information. I highlight some exciting recent investigations into the use of gravitational waves as tests of general relativity.

The fuzzball proposal makes a conjecture about the nature of black hole
microstates. Now, more than a decade old and including several different
philosophies and perspectives, it is especially relevant after the recent
firewall argument and ensuing debate. Over three lectures, I plan to start
with a very general discussion of the general ideas and motivations, then
review the theoretical evidence from string theory, and finally close by
discussing open questions, including the fate of a freely falling observer
as he/she passes through the black hole horizon.

The fuzzball proposal makes a conjecture about the nature of black hole
microstates. Now, more than a decade old and including several different
philosophies and perspectives, it is especially relevant after the recent
firewall argument and ensuing debate. Over three lectures, I plan to start
with a very general discussion of the general ideas and motivations, then
review the theoretical evidence from string theory, and finally close by
discussing open questions, including the fate of a freely falling observer
as he/she passes through the black hole horizon.

Causal dynamical triangulations (CDT) define a nonperturbative path integral for quantum gravity as a sum over triangulations. Causality is enforced on the kinematical level by means of a preferred
foliation.

In this talk I present a new model of dynamical triangulations based on Lorentzian building blocks, where the triangulations in general do not have such a preferred foliation. The essential ingredients of the new model are a local causality constraint and a consistency condition on the global flow of time. After a compact review on CDT I discuss the theoretical aspects of the new model in 1+1 and 2+1 dimensions, followed by a presentation of numerical results in 2+1 dimensions. These results show that the new model and CDT have similar long-distance properties in 2+1 dimensions.

The fuzzball proposal makes a conjecture about the nature of black hole
microstates. Now, more than a decade old and including several different
philosophies and perspectives, it is especially relevant after the recent
firewall argument and ensuing debate. Over three lectures, I plan to start
with a very general discussion of the general ideas and motivations, then
review the theoretical evidence from string theory, and finally close by
discussing open questions, including the fate of a freely falling observer

as he/she passes through the black hole horizon.

The decomposition of the magnetic moments in spin ice into freely moving magnetic monopoles has added a new dimension to the concept of fractionalization, showing that geometrical frustration, even in the absence of quantum fluctuations, can lead to the apparent reduction of fundamental objects into quasi particles of reduced dimension [1]. The resulting quasi-particles map onto a Coulomb gas in the grand canonical ensemble [2]. By varying the chemical potential one can drive the ground state from a vacuum to a monopole crystal with the Zinc blend structure [3].

The condensation of monopoles into the crystallized state leads to a new level of fractionalization:
the magnetic moments appear to collectively break into two distinct parts; the crystal of magnetic charge and a magnetic fluid showing correlations characteristic of an emergent Coulomb phase [4].

The ordered magnetic charge is synonymous with magnetic order, while the Coulomb phase space is equivalent to that of hard core dimers close packed onto a diamond lattice [5]. The relevance of these results to experimental systems will be discussed.

[1] C. Castelnovo, R. Moessner, and S. L. Sondhi, Nature 451, 42 (2008).
[2] L. D. C. Jaubert and P. C. W. Holdsworth, Nature Physics 5, 258 (2009).
[3] M. Brooks-Bartlett, A. Harman-Clarke, S. Banks, L. D. C. Jaubert and P. C. W. Holdsworth, In Preparation, (2013).
[4] C. L. Henley, Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics 1, 179 (2010).
[5] D. A. Huse, W. Krauth, R. Moessner, and S. L. Sondhi, Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 167004 (2003).

Expressions of several information theoretic quantities involve an optimization over auxiliary quantum registers. Entanglement-assisted version of some classical communication problems provides examples of such expressions. Evaluating these expressions requires bounds on the dimension of these auxiliary registers. In the classical case such a bound can usually be obtained based on the
Caratheodory theorem, but we know almost no method to bound the dimension of auxiliary quantum registers. In this talk to compare the classical and quantum sides of the problem the notion of “quantum convexification” will be defined. It will be shown that quantum convexification is strictly richer that the usual classical convexification. Moreover some techniques will be discussed which might be useful for bounding the dimension of quantum auxiliary registers. 

By way of presenting some classic and many new results, my talk will indulge shamelessly in
advertising "Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT)" as a hands-on approach to nonperturbative quantum gravity that reaches where other approaches currently don't. After summarizing the rationale and basic ingredients of CDT quantum gravity and some of its key findings (like the emergence of a classical de Sitter space), I will focus on some very recent results: how we uncovered the presence of a second-order phase transition (so far unique in 4D quantum
gravity), news on the controversy between doing things the Lorentzian or the Euclidean way, and new results on the role of the preferred time slicing in CDT - all hopefully worth your while!

We discuss well-posed initial-boundary value formulations
in general relativity. These formulations allow us to construct solutions of
Einstein's field equations inside a cylindrical region, given suitable initial
and boundary data. We analyze the restrictions on the boundary data that result
from the requirement of constraint propagation and the minimization of spurious
reflections, and choosing harmonic coordinates we show how to cast the problem
into well-posed form. Then, we consider the particular case where the boundary
represents null infinity of an asymptotically flat spacetime. Here, the rôle of
the boundary conditions is to provide adequate regularity and gauge conditions
at infinity.

As an application of our setup we mention ongoing work on
the computation of quasi-stationary scalar field configurations on a
non-rotating supermassive black hole background.