Scientific Series

Binary neutron stars are among the most important sources of gravitational waves which are expected to be detected by the current or next generation of gravitational wave detectors, such as LIGO and Virgo, and they are also thought to be at the origin of very important astrophysical phenomena, such as short gamma-ray bursts. In order to describe the dynamics of these events one needs to solve the full set of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics equations through the use of parallel numerical codes. I will report on some recent results obtained with the use of the fully general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic code Whisky in simulating binary neutron stars which inspiral and merge forming an hypermassive neutron star which eventually collapses to form a black hole surrounded by a torus. I will in particular describe how mass, equation of state and magnetic fields can affect the dynamics and consequently the gravitational waves emitted by these systems and discuss about their possible connection with the formation of short gamma ray bursts.

"Extended" topological field theory generalizes ordinary TQFT to include spacetimes with boundary. Starting from a gauge theory of flat G-connections, and its boundary restriction, I will describe a plan for constructing an extended topological field theory, for any compact Lie group G. This is based on work-in-progress with Jeffrey Morton.

Viscosity is a very old concept which was introduced to physics by Navier in the 19th century. However, in strongly coupled systems, the viscosity is usually difficult to compute. In this talk I will describe how gauge/gravity duality, a by-product of string theory, allows one to compute the viscosity for a class of strongly interacting fluids not too dissimilar to the quark gluon plasma. I will also describe efforts to measure the viscosity and other physical properties of the quark gluon plasma at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

We will review the definitions of spin foam models for quantum gravity and the recent advances in this field, such as the "graviton propagator", the definition of coherent states of geometry and the derivation of non-commutative field theories as describing the effective dynamics of matter coupled to quantum gravity. I will insist on the role of group field theories as providing a non-perturbative definition of spinfoams and their intricate relation with non-commutative geometry and matrix models.

It has recently uncovered that the intertwiner space for LQG carries a natural representation of the U(N) unitary group. I will describe this U(N) action in details and show how it can be used to compute the LQG black hole entropy, to define coherent intertwiner states and to reformulate the LQG dynamics in new terms.

We describe a class of non-Fermi liquid systems, using the AdS/CFT correspondence. The Fermi surfaces are studied by computing the response functions of fermionic operators. The scaling behavior near the Fermi surfaces is determined by conformal dimensions in an emergent IR CFT. The low-energy excitations near the Fermi momenta are not Landau quasiparticles. When the operator is marginal in the IR CFT, the full spectral function is precisely of the `marginal Fermi liquid' form, introduced as a phenomenological model of the `strange metal' phase of high temperature superconductors.

The sneutrino is a viable NLSP candidate in SUSY with gravitino LSP. In my talk I will focus on this possibility, in particular concentrating on the question of whether the LHC can distinguish spectra with a sneutrino NLSP from alternatives, e.g. ones with neutralino LSP. I will show that there are at least two different families of experimentally allowed spectra with sneutrino NLSP which exhibit distinctive multilepton signals. These spectra are not easy to fake within the MSSM. I will discuss these signals in detail and illustrate our analysis approach on simulations.

Last May, NASA astronauts performed a challenging and flawless Space Shuttle servicing mission to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. With science instruments repaired on board and incredible new ones installed, the observatory is more powerful now than ever before. I will show the dramatic highlights of the mission, and present some of the first results from the refurbished telescope. The sensitivity and multi-wavelength capabilities are revealing the highest redshift galaxies ever seen as well as details of the cosmic web of intergalactic medium, large scale structure formation, and stellar evolution. Studies of dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanet atmospheres add to the profound contributions to astrophysics that Hubble is making, at the new apex of its capabilities.

In quantum information, entanglement has often been viewed as a resource. But in this talk, I will look at (pure bipartite) entanglement through the lens of superselection rules. The idea is that it requires quantum communication not only to create entanglement, but also to destroy it in a way that doesn't leak information to the environment. As a result, when communication is scarce, superpositions of different numbers of EPR pairs can be difficult to obtain. This constraint is not a strict superselection rule, but rather an approximate version that gives rigorous bounds on achievable fidelities. After describing the general phenomenon, I will show how it relates to communication complexity, information theory and fairy tales about princesses. This talk is based on 0803.3066, 0909.1557, 0912.5537 and other unpublished work.

In this talk, I will demonstrate that correlations inconsistent with any locally causal description can be a generic feature of measurements on entangled quantum states. Specifically, spatially-separated parties who perform local measurements on a maximally-entangled state using randomly chosen measurement bases can, with significant probability, generate nonclassical correlations that violate a Bell inequality. For n parties using a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state, this probability of violation rapidly tends to unity as the number of parties increases. Moreover, even with both a randomly chosen two-qubit pure state and randomly chosen measurement bases, a violation can be found about 10% of the time. Amongst other applications, our work provides a feasible alternative for the demonstration of Bell inequality violation without a shared reference frame.

Are Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity unrelated theories? Is Quantum Field Theory an additional theoretical layer over them? Where the quantization rules and the Plank constant come from? All these questions can find answer in the computational paradigm: "the universe is a huge quantum computer". In my talk I'll take the computational-universe paradigm as genuine theoretical framework, and analyze some relevant implications. A new kind of quantum field theory emerges: "Quantum-Computational Field Theory" (QCFT). I will show how in QCFT Special Relativity unfolds from the fabric of the computational network, which also naturally embeds gauge-invariance, and even the quantization rule and the Planck constant, which thus resort to being properties of the underlying causal tapestry of space-time. In this way Quantum Mechanics remains the only theory needed to describe the computational-universe. I will analyze few simple toy-models in order to explore the mathematical structure of QCFT. The new QCFT has many advantages versus the customary field theoretical framework, solving a number of logical and mathematical problems that plague quantum field theory. One further advantage of QCFT is the possibility of changing the computational engine without changing the field-theoretical framework. One can thus consider different kind of engines, e.g. classical, quantum, super-quantum, and even input-output networks with no pre-established causal relations, which are very interesting for addressing the problem of Quantum Gravity. QCFT opens a large research line: I argue that this program should be addressed soon in the particle physics domain, before entering Quantum Gravity, notwithstanding the experimental success of the usual quantum field theory. It will also be the first test of the Lucien Hardy's program on Quantum Gravity. Reference: arXiv:1001.1088 (http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.1088)

How can we describe a device that takes two unknown operational boxes and conditionally on some input variable connects them in different orders? In order to answer this question, I will introduce maps from transformations to transformations within operational probabilistic theories with purification, and show their characterisation in terms of operational circuits. I will then proceed exploring the hierarchy of maps on maps. A particular family of maps in the hierarchy are the ones whose output is in the set of transformations. These maps can be fully characterised by their correspondence with channels with memory, and it is exactly the family of transformations that can be implemented through operational circuits. I will then show the problems that arise in defining the remainder of the hierarchy, and the reason why we cannot avoid considering its elements. The main consequence of admitting the generalised transformations as possible within the operational theory is that we cannot describe them in terms of simple causal connection of transformations in a circuit with a fixed causal structure. In quantum theory, we can understand such higher order transformations in terms of superpositions of circuits with different causal structures. The problem whether computations exploiting higher-order transformations can be efficiently simulated by a conventional circuital computer is posed.