Video Library

Since 2002 Perimeter Institute has been recording seminars, conference talks, and public outreach events using video cameras installed in our lecture theatres.  Perimeter now has 7 formal presentation spaces for its many scientific conferences, seminars, workshops and educational outreach activities, all with advanced audio-visual technical capabilities.  Recordings of events in these areas are all available On-Demand from this Video Library and on Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive (PIRSA)PIRSA is a permanent, free, searchable, and citable archive of recorded seminars from relevant bodies in physics. This resource has been partially modelled after Cornell University's arXiv.org.

The Toric Code, Perturbed

Wednesday Nov 12, 2008
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By storing quantum information in the degenerate ground state of a Hamiltonian, it is hoped that it can be made quite robust against noise processes. We will examine this situation, with particular emphasis on the Toric code in 2D, and show how adversarial effects, either perturbations to the Hamiltonian or interactions with an environment, destroy the stored information extremely quickly.

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Quantum Field Theory 1 - Lecture 10B

Wednesday Nov 12, 2008
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Quantum Field Theory I course taught by Volodya Miransky of the University of Western Ontario

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The emergence of photons, electrons, and gravitons from quantum qbit systems

Wednesday Nov 12, 2008
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We show that if a condensed matter system (a quantum qbit system) is in a string-net condensed state, then the low energy excitation in such a system can be gauge bosons (such as photons) and fermions (such as electrons). Such a system is actually the ether that we have been looking for 150 years. We will also discuss a quantum qbit system that may even give rise to emergent gravitons.

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Quantum Field Theory 1 - Lecture 10A

Wednesday Nov 12, 2008
Speaker(s):

Quantum Field Theory I course taught by Volodya Miransky of the University of Western Ontario

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Physical Limits of Inference

Tuesday Nov 11, 2008
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I show that physical devices that perform observation, prediction, or recollection share an underlying mathematical structure. I call devices with that structure inference devices\'\'. I present a set of existence and impossibility results concerning inference devices. These results hold independent of the precise physical laws governing our universe. In a limited sense, the impossibility results establish that Laplace was wrong to claim that even in a classical, non-chaotic universe the future can be unerringly predicted, given sufficient knowledge of the present.

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Cosmology of the Lee-Wick Model

Tuesday Nov 11, 2008

The Lee-Wick model has recently been put forwards as an alternative to supersymmetry for solving the hierarchy problem of particle physics. I will show that, modulo important consistency questions, coupling the Lee-Wick model to cosmology leads to a bouncing universe cosmology with a scale-invariant spectrum of cosmological fluctuations emerging from quantum vacuum fluctuations in the contracting phase.

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Generating Tree Amplitudes in N=4 SYM and N=8 Super-Gravity

Tuesday Nov 11, 2008
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TBA

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Torsion and the Holography of Parity Breaking

Thursday Nov 06, 2008
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TBA

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Emergent spacetimes

Thursday Nov 06, 2008
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We discuss the possibility that spacetime geometry may be an emergent phenomenon. This idea has been motivated by the Analogue Gravity programme. An \'effective gravitational field\' dominates the kinematics of small perturbations in an Analogue Model. In these models there is no obvious connection between the \'gravitational\' field tensor and the Einstein equations, as the emergent spacetime geometry arises as a consequence of linearising around some classical field. After a brief introduction on this topic, we present our recent contributions to the field.

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Astrophysics and Cosmology through Problems - 10B

Thursday Nov 06, 2008
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This course is aimed at advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, and is inspired by a book by the same title, written by Padmanabhan. Each session consists of solving one or two pre-determined problems, which is done by a randomly picked student. While the problems introduce various subjects in Astrophysics and Cosmology, they do not serve as replacement for standard courses in these subjects, and are rather aimed at educating students with hands-on analytic/numerical skills to attack new problems.

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