Scientific Series

The Background Imager of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP) experiment is the first polarimeter developed to measure the inflationary B-mode polarization of the CMB. During three seasons of observing at the South Pole, Antarctica beginning in 2006, BICEP mapped 2% of the sky chosen to be clean of polarized foreground emission, with sub-degree resolution. In this colloquium I will present initial results derived from a subset of the data acquired during the first two years of data and discuss the unique design features of BICEP which led to the first meaningful limits on the tensor-to-scalar ratio to come from B-mode polarization. Recently, Xia, Li & Zhang (2009) have claimed a detection of parity-violating "cosmic birefringence" effects using publicly available BICEP data. I will discuss polarimetric fidelity in the light of systematic errors and how such effects are particularly pernicious for probes of cosmic parity violation. I will conclude with a discussion demonstrating how BICEP, and its successor "BICEP2" will inform future measurements of the inflationary gravitational wave background and cosmic birefringence.

I will present recent work [1] on preparation by measurement of Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) states in circuit quantum electrodynamics. In particular, for the 3-qubit case, when employing a nonlinear filter on the recorded homodyne signal the selected states are found to exhibit values of the Bell–Mermin operator exceeding 2 under realistic conditions. I will discuss the potential of the dispersive readout to demonstrate a violation of the Mermin bound, and present a measurement scheme avoiding the necessity for full detector tomography. [1] Lev S Bishop et al 2009 New J. Phys. 11 073040

In addition to its ability to probe Inflation, CMB polarization offers the intriguing possibility to detect CP-symmetry violation. In some sense these predictions, if true, would be more surprising than confirmation of the inflationary paradigm -- for which ample, albeit circumstantial, evidence already exists. Moreover, recent theoretical predictions imply that, not only are parity violating CMB polarization effects possible, but that they have already been detected at 3\sigma confidence levels in existing polarization data. I will present a worked example showing the impact of experimental systematic effects on such measurements, and present a robust test to help determine the veracity of the theoretical predictions. I will show that the CP-symmetry violating observables are more susceptible to certain systematic effects, and discuss the future prospects for such CMB polarization probes of fundamental physics.

I will tell how the story given in Umberto Eco's book The Search for the Perfect Language continues with modern work on logical and programming languages.(For more information, see http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/hu.html.)

We present a first-principles implementation of {\em spatial} scale invariance as a local gauge symmetry in geometry dynamics using the method of best matching. In addition to the 3-metric, the proposed scale invariant theory also contains a 3-vector potential A_k as a dynamical variable. Although some of the mathematics is similar to Weyl's ingenious, but physically questionable, theory, the equations of motion of this new theory are second order in time-derivatives. It is tempting to try to interpret the vector potential A_k as the electromagnetic field. We exhibit four independent reasons for not giving into this temptation. A more likely possibility is that it can play the role of ``dark matter''. Indeed, as noted in scale invariance seems to play a role in the MOND phenomenology. Spatial boundary conditions are derived from the free-endpoint variation method and a preliminary analysis of the constraints and their propagation in the Hamiltonian formulation is presented.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) -- rare flashes of ~ MeV gamma-rays lasting from a fraction of a second to hundreds of seconds -- have long been among the most enigmatic of astrophysical transients. Observations during the past decade have led to a revolution in our understanding of these events, associating them with the birth of neutron stars and/ or black holes during either the collapse of a massive star or the merger of two compact objects (e.g., a neutron star and a black hole). GRBs are particularly interesting since NS-NS and NS-BH mergers are the primary target for km-scale gravitational wave observatories such as Advanced LIGO; GRBs are also one of the most promising astrophysical sources of very high- energy neutrinos and may produce many of the neutron-rich heavy elements in nature. In this talk, I will describe the physics of these enigmatic events and summarize outstanding problems. Combined electromagnetic and gravitational-wave observations of these sources in the coming decade have the potential to produce major advances in both astrophysics and fundamental physics (tests of General Relativity and of the equation of state of dense nuclear matter).

At NIST we are engaged in an experiment whose goal is to create superpositions of optical coherent states (such superpositions are sometimes called "Schroedinger cat" states). We use homodyne detection to measure the light, and we apply maximum likelihood quantum state tomography to the homodyne data to estimate the state that we have created. To assist in this analysis we have made a few improvements to quantum state tomography: we have devised a new iterative method (that has faster convergence than R*\rho*R iterations) to find the maximum likelihood state, we have formulated a stopping criterion that can upper-bound the actual maximum likelihood, and we have implemented a bias-corrected resampling strategy to estimate confidence intervals.

The Standard model of Cosmology consists of a package of ideas that include Cold Dark Matter, Inflation, and the existence of a small Cosmological Constant. While there is no consensus about what lies beyond the Standard Model, there is a leading candidate that also includes a small package of ideas: A Landscape of connected vacua: the idea that the universe started out with a large energy density, and Coleman DeLuccia Tunneling between vacua. An additional idea that comes from string theory and black hole physics is the Holographic Principle. I will explain how the various ingredients for a "post-standard-model" standard model fit together.