Scientific Series

The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-meter submm-wave telescope optimized for large-field imaging of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at arcminute resolution. The first key project of the SPT is a large area survey to find galaxy clusters using the Sunyaev-Zel\'dovich effect. Combined with optically determined redshifts, the survey yields will be used to place constraints on the nature of dark energy, via its effect on the growth of clusters and the geometry of the universe. Working toward this goal, the SPT has surveyed two 100 square degree fields at high sensitivity. This talk will review the status of the SPT, present some of the first SZ results, and discuss future science with this instrument.

The standard Hamiltonian formulation of (first order) gravity breaks manifest covariance both in its retention of the Lorentz group as a local gauge group and in its discrepant treatment of spacelike and timelike diffeomorphisms. Here we promote more covariant alternatives for canonical quantum gravity that address each of these problems, and discuss the implications for both the classical and the quantum theory of gravity. By retaining the full local Lorentz group, one gains significant insight into the geometric and algebraic properties of the Hamiltonian dynamics. As an example, we discuss the possibility of computing the internal spin angular momentum of asymptotically flat spacetimes, which may lead to insight into the nature of spin in quantum gravity. By treating the spacelike and timelike diffeomorphisms on equal footing, using techniques from geometric quantization we find a new representation of the quantum constraints where the total Hamiltonian is kinematical in the same vein as the Gauss and diffeomorphism constraints. Finally, we discuss the possibility of a manifestly 4-dimensional symplectic form on the Lagrangian phase space.

Exactly half a century after Minkowski’s justly famous lecture, Dirac’s efforts to quantize gravity led him “to doubt how fundamental the four-dimensional requirement in physics is”. Dirac does not appear to have explored this doubt further, but I shall argue that it needs to be considered seriously. The fact is that Einstein and Minkowski fused space and time into a four-dimensional continuum but never directly posed the two most fundamental questions in dynamics: What is time? What is motion? It was an historical accident that Einstein attempted to implement Mach’s principle after he had created special relativity; otherwise he would have been forced to address these questions, which have never been properly considered. I shall show how they can be answered and suggest that: 1) time and space are utterly different; 2) the dynamical law of the universe may define absolute simultaneity in a manner that is still consistent with local validity of Minkowski’s marvellous notion of spacetime.

I will discuss fine tuning in modified gravity models that can account for today’s dark energy. I will introduce some models where the underlying cosmological constant may be Planck scale but starts as a redundant coupling which can be eliminated by a field redefinition. The observed vacuum energy arises when the redundancy is explicitly broken. I’ll give a recipe for constructing models that realize this mechanism and satisfy all solar system constraints on gravity, including one based on Gauss-Bonnet gravity which provides a technically natural explanation for dark energy.

In frustrated systems, competing interactions lead to complex phase diagrams and sometimes entirely new states of matter. Frustration often arises from the lattice geometry, leaving the system delicately balanced between a variety of possible orders. A number of normally weak effects can lead to a lifting of this degeneracy. For example, I will discuss how quantum fluctuations can stabilize a supersolid phase, where the system is at once both a crystal and a superfluid. Frustrated magnets are promising candidates for realizing spin liquid phases with exotic \'topological order\', and new kinds of quantum phase transitions that have no classical analog. Bio: Ashvin Vishwanath received his MSc from IIT Kanpur in 1996, and PhD from Princeton in 2001. After holding the Papparlardo fellowship at MIT, he joined UC Berkeley in 2004, where he is currently associate professor of physics. He specializes in theoretical condensed matter physics, especially magnetism, superconductivity and other correlated quantum phenomena in solids and cold atomic gases. Ashvin is the recipient of several awards, most recently a Sloan fellowship (2004), a Hellman foundation fellowship (2006), and an NSF CAREER Award (2007).

A quantum channel models a physical process in which noise is added to a quantum system via interaction with its environment. Protecting quantum systems from such noise can be viewed as an extension of the classical communication problem introduced by Shannon sixty years ago. A fundamental quantity of interest is the quantum capacity of a given channel, which measures the amount of quantum information which can be protected, in the limit of many transmissions over the channel. In this talk, I will show that certain pairs of channels, each with a capacity of zero, can have a strictly positive capacity when used together, implying that the quantum capacity does not completely characterize a channel\'s ability to transmit quantum information. As a corollary, I will show that a commonly used lower bound on the quantum capacity - the coherent information, or hashing bound - is an overly pessimistic benchmark against which to measure the performance of quantum error correction because the gap between this bound and the capacity can be arbitrarily large.

According to the second law of thermodynamics the entropy of a system cannot decrease by adiabatic state transformations. In quantum mechanics, the \'degree of entanglement\' of a state cannot increase under state transformations of a certain kind (local operations assisted by classical communication) In this talk I will explore the significance of the analogy between these two statements.

After using the complex Hilbert space formalism for quantum theory for so long, it is very easy to begin to take for granted features like projection operators and the projection postulate, the algebra of observables, symmetric transition probabilities, linear evolution, etc.... Over the past 50 years there have been many attempts to gain a better understanding of this formalism by reconstructing it from different kinds of (sometimes) physically motivated assumptions. By looking at how the above features are motivated and used in different reconstructions, it becomes clear just how special and restrictive many of them are. The question is then what a theory which does not have some of these features looks like. Another interesting question is whether there are any reasons to be suspicious of postulating them in reconstructions or when trying to generalize or apply the quantum formalism to untested situations.

The QUaD experiment has recently released CMB polarization results at el>200 which are the most sensitive to date. The predicted series of peaks in the EE spectrum are shown to be present for the first time while BB remains undetectable. After briefly reviewing the motivation for polarization measurements I will move on to the experiment, observations, analysis technique and the final results. Finally I will mention on-going efforts to detect gravitational wave B modes.