The 24th annual Montreal Rochester Syracuse Toronto Conference on Theoretical Physics

Event Type: Conference
End date:
May 15, 2002 at 9:00 AM

The 24th annual Montreal-Rochester-Syracuse-Toronto (MRST) Conference on Theoretical Physics was held at Perimeter Institute on May 15-17, 2002. This was the first conference hosted by the new Institute and was held in memory of George Leibbrandt, an outstanding Canadian theorist (and frequent MRST participant). He played a vital role in all aspects of the founding of the Institute and served on its Board of Directors. It is a most fitting tribute to George that MRST has extended its orbit beyond its four founding universities to include Perimeter Institute.

 

Speakers:

Plenary Speakers:

  • Steve Giddings (UC Santa Barbara) spoke on the possible detection of microscopic black holes at the LHC.
  • Juan Maldacena (IAS) spoke on the recently discovered equivalence between certain strongly coupled gauge theories and quantum gravity with a negative cosmological constant.
  • Perimeter's own Lee Smolin spoke on recent developments in the understanding of quantum gravity with a positive cosmological constant. Finally, showcasing the world-class physics that is already being done in the local region, two plenary speakers gave stimulating experimental talks.
  • Dick Bond (CITA & University of Toronto) discussed the latest understanding of the cosmological parameters obtained from new data from the BOOMERANG experiment.
  • Art MacDonald (SNO and Queen's University) spoke on the recent exciting results from the SNO neutrino detector.

 

Participants:

73 physicists from over 25 universities and research institutes from Canada, the United States and Russia. Traditionally, MRST meetings have focused on topics in theoretical high energy physics, but in keeping with the wider range of research activity at Perimeter Institute, the scope of MRST-02 reflected a broader range of topics in theoretical physics, including talks on general relativity, quantum gravity, quantum computation and high Tc superconductivity. As always, this informal conference encouraged the active participation of many graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.