Video Library

Since 2002 Perimeter Institute has been recording seminars, conference talks, public outreach events such as talks from top scientists 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 and 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.

Accessibly by anyone with internet, Perimeter aims to share the power and wonder of science with this free library.

Diophantine approximation as Cosmic Censor for AdS black holes

Thursday Sep 24, 2020
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The statement that general relativity is deterministic finds its mathematical formulation in the celebrated ‘Strong Cosmic Censorship Conjecture’ due to Roger Penrose. I will present my recent results on this conjecture in the case of negative cosmological constant and in the context of black holes. It turns out that this is intimately tied to Diophantine properties of a suitable ratio of mass and angular momentum of the black hole.

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Sample-efficient learning of quantum many-body hamiltonians

Wednesday Sep 23, 2020
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We study the problem of learning the Hamiltonian of a quantum many-body system given samples from its Gibbs (thermal) state. The classical analog of this problem, known as learning graphical models or Boltzmann machines, is a well-studied question in machine learning and statistics. In this work, we give the first sample-efficient algorithm for the quantum Hamiltonian learning problem. In particular, we prove that polynomially many samples in the number of particles (qudits) are necessary and sufficient for learning the parameters of a spatially local Hamiltonian in l_2-norm.

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Can you make a magnet out of carbon?

Wednesday Sep 23, 2020

In most materials, electrons fill bands, starting from the lowest kinetic energy states. The Fermi level is the boundary between filled states below and empty states above. This is the basis for our very successful understanding of how metals and semiconductors work. But what if all the electrons within a band had the same kinetic energy (this situation is called a "flat band")? Then electrons could arrange themselves so as to minimize their Coulomb repulsion, giving rise to a wide variety of possible states including superconductors and magnets.

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Special Topics in Astrophysics - Numerical Hydrodynamics - Lecture 4

Tuesday Sep 22, 2020
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Effective entropy of quantum fields coupled with gravity

Tuesday Sep 22, 2020
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Entanglement entropy quantifies the amount of uncertainty of a quantum state. For quantum fields in curved space, entanglement entropy of the quantum field theory degrees of freedom is well-defined for a fixed background geometry. In this work, we propose a generalization of the quantum field theory entanglement entropy by including dynamical gravity.

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Halo gas thermodynamics from the cosmic microwave background: implications for large-scale structure and galaxy formation

Tuesday Sep 22, 2020
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Understanding galaxy formation is an outstanding problem in Astrophysics. The feedback processes that drive it, exploding stars and accretion onto supermassive black holes, are poorly understood. This results in an order unity uncertainty in the distribution of the gas inside halos, the missing baryon problem''. Because baryons are 15% of the total mass in the universe, this baryonic uncertainty is the largest theoretical systematics for percent precision weak lensing surveys like DES, HSC, Rubin Observatory, Roman Observatory and Euclid.

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Special Topics in Astrophysics - Numerical Hydrodynamics - Lecture 3

Thursday Sep 17, 2020
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Protected spin characters, link invariants, and q-nonabelianization

Thursday Sep 17, 2020
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In this talk I will describe a new link "invariant" (with certain wall-crossing properties) for links L in a three-manifold M, where M takes the form of a surface times the real line. This link "invariant" is constructed via a map, called the q-nonabelianization map, from the

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The formation and growth of supermassive black holes

Thursday Sep 17, 2020

Quasars are the most luminous objects in the universe powered by accretion onto supermassive black holes (SMBHs). They can be observed at the earliest cosmic epochs, providing unique insights into the early phases of black hole, structure, and galaxy formation. Observations of these quasars demonstrate that they host SMBHs at their center, already less than ~1 Gyr after the Big Bang.

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Holography of information from semiclassical gravity

Thursday Sep 17, 2020
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We will argue that even with semiclassical gravity, it can be shown that a copy of  all the information on a Cauchy slice resides near the boundary of the slice. We will first demonstrate this in asymptotically global AdS, and then in four-dimensional asymptotically flat space. We will then describe a physical protocol that can be used to verify this property at low-energies and within perturbation theory.

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