Talks

Black holes are associated with a variety of the most extreme and counter-intuitive phenomena in astronomy and physics. However, despite the passage of nearly 40 years since the discovery of the first strong black hole candidate, we have scant evidence that general relativity provides an accurate description of gravity in the immediate vicinity of astrophysical black holes. Over the next few years this will change dramatically.

The simulation of systems of anyons offers a significant challenge to the condensed matter physicist. These systems are presently of substantial theoretical and experimental interest due to their potential for universal quantum computation, but due to their non-trivial exchange statistics, the tools available for their study have been limited. In this talk, I will present a formalism whereby any existing tensor network algorithm may be adapted for use with both Abelian and non-Abelian anyons, culminating in our recent simulations of infinite 1-D chains of interacting anyons using the Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalisation Ansatz, or MERA, demonstrating that tensor network algorithms may be effectively employed in the study of anyonic systems.

For thousands of years people have wondered, "Are we alone?" Out of the 500 planets so far known to orbit nearby stars, about 100 transit their host stars, that is, the planet goes in front of its star as seen from Earth. The transiting planets are "goldmines" for astronomers, because the planetary sizes, masses, and atmospheres can be routinely measured. NASA's Kepler Space Telescope is further revolutionizing transiting exoplanet studies with its unprecedented photometric precision. Dr. Seager will share her unique insights as a member of the Kepler Science Team including a discussion of recent Kepler announcements. She will also share information on the pioneering technology development that will fuel the search for life on other worlds.

Scattering amplitudes in gauge theories and gravity have extraordinary properties that are completely invisible in the textbook formulation of quantum field theory using Feynman diagrams. In the standard approach--going back to the birth of quantum field theory--space-time locality and quantum-mechanical unitarity are made manifest at the cost of introducing huge gauge redundancies in our description of physics. As a consequence, apart from the very simplest processes, Feynman diagram calculations are enormously complicated, while the final results turn out to be amazingly simple, exhibiting hidden infinite-dimensional symmetries. This strongly suggests the existence of a new formulation of quantum field theory where locality and unitarity are derived concepts, while other physical principles are made more manifest. Rapid advances have been made towards uncovering this new picture, especially for the maximally supersymmetric gauge theory in four dimensions. These developments have interwoven and exposed connections between a remarkable collection of ideas from string theory, twistor theory and integrable systems, as well as a number of new mathematical structures in algebraic geometry. In this talk I will review the current state of this subject and and describe a number of ongoing directions of research.