Colloquium

Gravitational radiation promises to teach us many new
things about the universe and the world around us, but all attempts to observe
gravitational waves have so far been unsuccessful.  I will discuss some of the challenges we need
to overcome in our quest to detect this elusive form of energy, and how
tackling these challenges is opening new windows on fundamental physics.  I will show, specifically, how novel data
analysis strategies have been used to combat detector noise in searches for

The Pauli exclusion principle is a constraint on the
natural occupation numbers of fermionic states. It has been suspected for
decades, and only proved very recently, that there is a multitude of further
constraints on these numbers, generalizing the Pauli principle. Surprisingly,
these constraints are linear: they cut out a geometric object known as a
polytope. This is a beautiful mathematical result, but are there systems whose
physics is governed by these constraints?

The global warming
crisis is part of a bigger transformation in which humanity realizes that the
Earth is a finite system and that our population, energy usage, and the like
cannot continue to grow exponentially. While politics and economics pose the
biggest challenges, physicists are in a good position to help make this
transition a bit easier. After a quick review of the problems, we discuss a few
ways physicists can help. 

Human monkeys are used to thinking about the problem of
choosing from a set of objects according to some desired, biased, probability
distribution. Just think about how you chose your partner(s). Even when it is
easy for you to do such a sampling, it can be difficult to do a quantum
sampling (Q-Sampling) of the same distribution. By Q-Sampling I mean the
creation of a coherent superposition of states of such objects whose amplitudes
are the (square roots of) of the specified distribution. In this talk I will