Colloquium
This series covers all areas of research at Perimeter Institute, as well as those outside of PI's scope.
Seminar Series Events/Videos
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Wednesday May 09, 2018Speaker(s):
The general purpose computer can run any program we can express in
symbolic logic; that makes it the go-to tool for accomplishing any task
that can be reduced to a computable function, and that's why software is
eating the world and cars and colliders and airplanes and pacemakers and
toasters are all just turning into computers in fancy cases.Collection/Series:
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Wednesday Apr 25, 2018Speaker(s):
The surprising success of learning with deep neural networks poses two fundamental challenges: understanding why these networks work so well and what this success tells us about the nature of intelligence and our biological brain. Our recent Information Theory of Deep Learning shows that large deep networks achieve the optimal tradeoff between training size and accuracy, and that this optimality is achieved through the noise in the learning process.
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Wednesday Mar 14, 2018Speaker(s):
Quantum field theories play an important role in many condensed matter systems for their description at low energies and long length scales. In 1+1 dimensional critical systems the energy spectrum and the spectrum of scaling dimensions are intimately related in the presence of conformal symmetry. In higher space-time dimensions this relation is more subtle and not well explored numerically. In this talk we motivate and review our recent effort to characterize 2+1 dimensional quantum field theories using computational techniques 2+targetting the energy spectrum on a spatial torus.
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Wednesday Mar 07, 2018Speaker(s):
Red supergiants (RSGs) are the helium-fusing evolved descendants of moderately massive (10-25Mo) stars, the result of a near-horizontal evolution across the top of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram following their time on the main sequence. As the coldest and largest (in physical size) members of the massive star population, these stars represent a significant evolutionary extreme and serve as ideal "magnifying glasses" for scrutinizing our current understanding of massive stars and their role in the universe.
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Thursday Feb 22, 2018Speaker(s):
We are fortunate to live in an era of great discoveries in particle physics and cosmology, and most of the theoretical understanding that made this possibile is based on effective field theories. In this talk, I will show how these powerful techniques can be applied across the spectrum of theoretical physics, and allow us to draw unexpected connections among very different systems. To illustrate this, I will discuss two interesting but very different phenomena, and show how they can both be described using a point-like particle effective theory.
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Thursday Feb 22, 2018Speaker(s):
Two seemingly different quantum field theories may secretly describe the same underlying physics — a phenomenon known as “duality”. Duality has been proved powerful in condensed matter physics, since many difficult questions can be drastically simplified in certain “dual” pictures. This is especially valuable for strongly interacting many-body problems, for which traditional tools (such as perturbation theory) are often not applicable.
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Wednesday Feb 21, 2018Speaker(s):
The study of black holes has revealed a deep connection between quantum information and spacetime geometry. Its origin must lie in a quantum theory of gravity, so it offers a valuable hint in our search for a unified theory. Precise formulations of this relation recently led to new insights in Quantum Field Theory, some of which have been rigorously proven. An important example is our discovery of the first universal lower bound on the local energy density. The energy near a point can be negative, but it is bounded below by a quantity related to the information flowing past the point.
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Thursday Feb 15, 2018Speaker(s):
The recent detection of the binary neutron star merger GW170817 by LIGO and Virgo was followed by a firework of electromagnetic counterparts across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. In particular, the ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared emission is consistent with a kilonova that provided strong evidence for the formation of heavy elements in the merger ejecta by the rapid neutron capture process (r-process).
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Wednesday Feb 14, 2018Speaker(s):
Hidden-variables theories account for quantum mechanics in terms of a particular 'equilibrium' distribution of underlying parameters corresponding to the Born rule. In the most well-studied example, the pilot-wave theory of de Broglie and Bohm, it is well established that the Born rule may be understood to arise from a process of dynamical relaxation. This 'quantum relaxation' may have taken place in the very early universe and could have left imprints on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Such imprints amount to signatures of the decay of early violations of the Born rule.
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Wednesday Feb 07, 2018Speaker(s):
One of the most enduring mysteries in particle physics is the nature of the non-baryonic dark matter that makes up 85% of the matter in the universe. For several decades, most searches for this mysterious substance have focused on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). Recently, there has been a surge in theoretical interest in ultra-light-field dark matter candidates, including QCD axions (spin 0 bosons) and hidden photons (spin 1 bosons), which can be probed through their coupling to electromagnetism or nuclear spin.
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