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On Demand Recording: https://pirsa.org/C23035

The nature of space and time is one of the most foundational mysteries in both Physics and Philosophy. At the heart of this mystery are the two most successful theories of nature: Einstein's theory of relativity, an elegant and precise description of the geometry of our universe on large scales, and Quantum Mechanics, outlining accurate laws of interaction in the subatomic world. But these two great triumphs of 20th century physics remain inherently inconsistent, contradictory in their most basic principles, such as locality and causality. Nonetheless, the experimental domains or natural phenomena where these contradictions become manifest have remained elusive, and it is not clear that a century of theoretical investigation into quantum gravity is anywhere close to being verified in nature.

Arguably, this disconnect is our greatest and most foundational challenge in the history of Physics; despite groundbreaking progress in both theory and observations of quantum spacetimes, these two endeavours are moving farther apart. Successfully responding to this century-old challenge could require rethinking the epistemology of fundamental physics. While physicists are trained to push the frontiers of knowledge, developing a grand vision of the arch of history, and where we are (or should be) heading is a more interdisciplinary endeavor, requiring insights from theory and observations, but also philosophy and history.

We plan a focused, interactive, and highly interdisciplinary workshop, involving the world’s best theorists, observers, experimentalists, and philosophers, within a supportive, inclusive, and diverse environment, in order to kick start a long term initiative that might be our best bet to make significant progress towards uncovering the quantum nature of spacetime.

Sponsorship provided by:

Territorial Land Acknowledgemen

Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples.

Perimeter Institute is located on the Haldimand Tract. After the American Revolution, the tract was granted by the British to the Six Nations of the Grand River and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation as compensation for their role in the war and for the loss of their traditional lands in upstate New York. Of the 950,000 acres granted to the Haudenosaunee, less than 5 percent remains Six Nations land. Only 6,100 acres remain Mississaugas of the Credit land. 

We thank the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples for hosting us on their land.

Matter is quantum. Growing experimental results on materials, natural and synthetic (ion traps, cold atoms etc.,) and concomitant theoretical developments make `quantum matter' an exciting field. There is also a growing interplay of quantum matter physics and quantum information/computation. With a focus on concepts I plan to discuss key phenomenology, quantum models and theory.

Title: An introduction to twistors Course Description: Twistor theory, introduced by Penrose many years ago, is a way to reformulate massless fields on four-dimensional space-time in terms of an auxiliary 6-dimensional complex manifold, called twistor space. This course will introduce twistor space and the Penrose correspondence (relating fields on twistor space and space-time), at both classical and quantum levels. We will discuss the twistor realization of self-dual Yang-Mills theory and of self-dual gravity. If time permits we will discuss the connection between twistors and celestial holography.

The main focus of this course is the exploration of the symmetry structure of General Relativity which is an essential step before any attempt at a (direct) quantization of GR. We will start by developing powerful tools for the analysis of local symmetries in physical theories (the covariant phase space method) and then apply it to increasingly complex theories: the parametrized particle, Yang--Mills theory, and finally General Relativity. We will discover in which ways these theories have similar symmetry structures and in which ways GR is special. We will conclude by reviewing classical results on the uniqueness of GR given its symmetry structure and discuss why it is so hard to quantize it. In tutorials and homeworks, through the reading of articles and collegial discussions in the classroom---as well as good old exercises---you will explore questions such as "Should general relativity be quantized at all? Is a single graviton detactable (even in principle)?", "What is the meaning of the wave functions of the universe?", "Can we do physics without time?".

We will cover the basics of the gauge/gravity duality, including some of the following aspects: holographic fluids, applications to condensed matter systems, entanglement entropy, and recent advances in understanding the black hole information paradox.

This school will be an advanced course on the numerical bootstrap. In the lectures, we will discuss advanced theoretical aspects of numerical bootstrap and algorithms. In the tutorials, we will demonstrate how to use simpleboot/hyperion and help the participants to run bootstrap computation on their own clusters. Main examples are 3D Ising, O(2), O(3), Gross-Neveu-Yukawa CFTs. 

The school will consist of one lecture in the morning and two tutorials in the afternoon (one tutorial for simpleboot (by Ning Su) and another one for hyperion (by Aike Liu).

Course materials, including tutorials, slides, and sample codes, can be found at https://gitlab.com/AikeLiu/Bootstrap-Mini-Course

This event is supported by the Simons Collaboration on The Nonperturbative Bootstrap (https://bootstrapcollaboration.com/). 

https://pirsa.org/C23030

Territorial Land Acknowledgement

Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples.

Perimeter Institute is located on the Haldimand Tract. After the American Revolution, the tract was granted by the British to the Six Nations of the Grand River and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation as compensation for their role in the war and for the loss of their traditional lands in upstate New York. Of the 950,000 acres granted to the Haudenosaunee, less than 5 percent remains Six Nations land. Only 6,100 acres remain Mississaugas of the Credit land. 

We thank the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples for hosting us on their land.

Recently we have seen exciting results at the intersection of quantum foundations and the statistical analysis of causal hypotheses by virtue of the centrality of latent variable models to both fields.

In this workshop we will explore how academics from both sides can move the shared frontiers forward. Towards that end, we are including extensive breakout collaboration opportunities in addition to formal presentations. In order to make concrete progress on problems pertinent to both communities, we have selected the topic of causal models with restricted cardinality of the latent variables as a special focus for this workshop. 

Sponsorship for this workshop has been provided by:

https://pirsa.org/C23017

Territorial Land Acknowledgement

Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples.

Perimeter Institute is located on the Haldimand Tract. After the American Revolution, the tract was granted by the British to the Six Nations of the Grand River and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation as compensation for their role in the war and for the loss of their traditional lands in upstate New York. Of the 950,000 acres granted to the Haudenosaunee, less than 5 percent remains Six Nations land. Only 6,100 acres remain Mississaugas of the Credit land. 

We thank the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples for hosting us on their land.

The course is an introduction to quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Upon building up the general formalism, the latter is applied to several topics in the modern theory of gravity and cosmology where the quantum properties of fundamental fields play an essential role.

Topics to be covered:
1) Radiation of particles by moving mirrors 
2) Hawking radiation of black holes  
3) Production of primordial density perturbations and gravity waves during inflation
4) Statistical properties of the primordial spectra  

Required prior knowledge:
Foundations of quantum mechanics and general relativity

Can the effectiveness of a medical treatment be determined without the expense of a randomized controlled trial? Can the impact of a new policy be disentangled from other factors that happen to vary at the same time? Questions such as these are the purview of the field of causal inference, a general-purpose science of cause and effect, applicable in domains ranging from epidemiology to economics. Researchers in this field seek in particular to find techniques for extracting causal conclusions from statistical data. Meanwhile, one of the most significant results in the foundations of quantum theory—Bell’s theorem—can also be understood as an attempt to disentangle correlation and causation. Recently, it has been recognized that Bell’s result is an early foray into the field of causal inference and that the insights derived from almost 60 years of research on his theorem can supplement and improve upon state-of-the-art causal inference techniques. In the other direction, the conceptual framework developed by causal inference researchers provides a fruitful new perspective on what could possibly count as a satisfactory causal explanation of the quantum correlations observed in Bell experiments. Efforts to elaborate upon these connections have led to an exciting flow of techniques and insights across the disciplinary divide. This course will explore what is happening at the intersection of these two fields. zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94143784665?pwd=VFJpajVIMEtvYmRabFYzYnNRSVAvZz09