Scientific Series

Modern motivations for extra spacetime dimensions will be presented, in particular the surprising AdS/CFT connection to particle compositeness. It will be shown how highly curved, "warped", extra-dimensional geometries can naturally address several puzzles of fundamental physics, including the weakness of gravity, particle mass hierarchies, dark matter, and supersymmetry breaking. The possibility of direct discovery of warped dimensions at particle colliders such as the CERN Large Hadron Collider will be discussed. Some current questions in warped cosmology will also be introduced.

The progress in neutrino physics over the past ten years has been tremendous: we have learned that neutrinos have mass and change flavor. I will pick out one of the threads of the story-- the measurement of flavor oscillation in neutrinos produced by cosmic ray showers in the atmosphere, and its confirmation in long distance beam experiments. I will present the history, the current state of knowledge, and how the next generation of high intensity beam experiments will address some of the remaining puzzles.

We introduce a framework that allows to calculate cosmological perturbations in a gauge invariant manner to any order. The two main features of this framework are to take physical observables as basic objects and to treat the variables describing the background geometry as fully dynamical. Backreaction effects can therefore naturally adressed. At the end I will mention applications to Loop Quantum Cosmology.

I will survey recent feasibility results on building multi-party cryptographic protocols which manipulate quantum data or are secure against quantum adversaries. The focus will be protocols for secure evaluation of quantum circuits. Along the way, I'll discuss how quantum machines can (and can't) prove knowledge of a secret to a distrustful partner. The talk is based on recent unpublished results, as well as older joint work with subsets of Michael Ben-Or, Claude Crepeau, Daniel Gottesman, and Avinatan Hasidim (STOC '02, FOCS '02, Eurocrypt '05, FOCS '06).

Among the possible explanations for the observed acceleration of the universe, perhaps the boldest is the idea that new gravitational physics might be the culprit. In this colloquium I will discuss some of the challenges of constructing a sensible phenomenological extension of General Relativity, give examples of some candidate models of modified gravity and survey existing observational constraints on this approach. I will conclude by discussing how we might hope to distinguish between modifications of General Relativity and dark energy as competing hypotheses to explain cosmic acceleration.

Dark matter and dark energy can be explained without resorting to exotic fields if one accepts that the geometry of spacetime is governed by suitable generalized gravitational theories based on Lagrangians that are non-linear in the curvature of a metric and/or a torsionless linear connection, i.e. in second order and first order formalisms. A convenient choice of nonquadratic Lagrangians can fit well most of the astrophysical, cosmological and solar system requirements imposed by experimental results, without drastic modifications of Einstein field equations and with FRW Cosmologies preserved as a good approximation of Nature at a global scale.