# 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.

## Can inflation really begin with inhomogenous initial conditions?

Thursday Jun 16, 2016
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Thursday Jun 16, 2016
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## Spacetime Dynamics of the Higgs Instability and the Fate of the Early Universe

Thursday Jun 16, 2016
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A remarkable feature of the Standard Model is that it predicts that, in the absence of new physics, the Higgs field should become unstable at large energies. Though the electroweak vacuum should currently be metastable on timescales that are long compared to the age of the Universe, during an inflationary period, quantum fluctuations could have driven the development of regions of true vacuum at negative energy densities.

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## Journal club: Frauchiger-Renner no-go theorem for single-world interpretations of quantum theory

Wednesday Jun 15, 2016
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In this talk I will go over the recent paper by Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner, "Single-world interpretations of quantum theory cannot be self-consistent" (arXiv:1604.07422).

The paper introduces an extended Wigner's friend thought experiment, which makes use of Hardy's paradox to show that agents will necessarily reach contradictory conclusions - unless they take into account that they themselves may be in a superposition, and that their subjective experience of observing an outcome is not the whole story.

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Wednesday Jun 15, 2016
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Wednesday Jun 15, 2016
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The gravitational-wave observation GW150914 by Advanced LIGO provides the first opportunity to learn about theoretical physics mechanisms that may be present in the extreme gravity environment of coalescing binary black holes. The LIGO collaboration verified that this observation is consistent with Einstein's theory of General Relativity, constraining the presence of parametric anomalies in the signal. In this talk, I will discuss the plethora of additional inferences about gravity that can be drawn from the absence of such anomalies in the LIGO observation.

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## Interference Energy Spectrum of the Infinite Square Well

Wednesday Jun 15, 2016
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Certain superposition states of the 1-D infinite square well have transient zeros at locations other than the nodes of the eigenstates that comprise them. It is shown that if an infinite potential barrier is suddenly raised at some or all of these zeros, the well can be split into multiple adjacent infinite square wells without affecting the wavefunction.

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## The Dynamical Strong-field Regime of General Relativity

Wednesday Jun 15, 2016
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In this talk I will discuss some of the consequences for our understanding of strong-field gravity that can be gleaned from the recent detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration.

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## Black hole ringdown and quasinormal modes

Wednesday Jun 15, 2016
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The first detection of gravitational waves came with an unexpected windfall: a clear signal from the merger of two black holes into a final, spinning black hole. General Relativity predicts that following merger, the final black hole relaxes by emitting radiation in a characteristic spectrum of decaying modes. I will discuss these quasinormal modes'' and what can be learned from them, as well as the black hole ringdown observed in GW150914.

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## Next Public Lecture

Check back for details on the next lecture in Perimeter's Public Lectures Series

## RECENT PUBLIC LECTURE

### Mario Livio: Brilliant Blunders

Speaker: Mario Livio