ICTP-SAIFR Activities

Neste colóquio discorreremos sobre como conceitos da física são aplicados no mercado financeiro, enfatizando (i) o que mercado financeiro espera dos jovens ingressantes e (ii) como é a relação academia – mercado financeiro.

In this talk, I will first introduce the notion of operator delocalization, to be contrasted with the more conventional notion of operator growth, as a fundamental building block of operator scrambling.I will then use this machinery to analytically investigate the quantum charging advantage of a family of SYK quantum batteries. I will show that such an advantage ultimately relies on the operator delocalization properties of large size operators under the SYK dynamics, while it is unaffected by the presence or absence of operator growth.

In this seminar, I present a study of the electroweak phase transition and baryogenesis in Composite Higgs models. In these scenarios, the Higgs arises from a new, strongly-coupled sector that confines near the TeV scale. The confinement phase transition is described in terms of the dilaton, the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson of broken conformal invariance of the Composite Higgs sector. From the analysis of the joint Higgs-dilaton potential, I show that the electroweak phase transition can naturally be first-order, satisfying one key requirement for electroweak baryogenesis. I then discuss how a sufficient amount of CP violation – another key ingredient of baryogenesis – can be generated from quark Yukawa couplings which vary during the phase transition. Together this setup allows for successful electroweak baryogenesis. This scenario can be tested in complementary ways: in EDM experiments, by searching for dilaton production and deviations in Higgs couplings at colliders, and through gravitational waves at LISA.

Height models and random tiling are well-studied objects in classical statistical mechanics and combinatorics that lead to many interesting phenomena, such as arctic curve, limit shape and Kadar-Parisi-Zhang scaling. We introduce quantum dynamics to the classical hexagonal dimer, 6- and 19-vertex models to construct frustration-free Hamiltonians with unique ground state being a superposition of tiling configurations subject to a particular boundary configuration. The local Hilbert space is enlarged with a color degree of freedom to generate long range entanglement that makes area law violation of entanglement entropy possible. The scaling of entanglement entropy between half systems is analysed with the surface tension theory of random surfaces and under a q-deformation that weighs random surfaces in the ground state superposition by the volume below, it undergoes a phase transition from area law to volume scaling. At the critical point, the scaling is L logL due to the so-called "entropic repulsion” of Gaussian free fields conditioned to be positive. An exact holographic tensor network description of the ground state is proposed with one extra dimension perpendicular to the lattice. I will also discuss inhomogeneous deformations to obtain sub-volume intermediate scaling and possible generalisations to higher dimension.

Collective cell movement is critical to the emergent properties of many multicellular systems including microbial self-organization in biofilms, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. However, even the best-studied systems lack a complete picture of how diverse physical and chemical cues act upon individual cells to ensure coordinated multicellular behavior. Myxococcus xanthus is a model bacteria famous for its coordinated multicellular behavior resulting in dynamic patterns formation. For example, when starving millions of cells coordinate their movement to organize into fruiting bodies – aggregates containing tens of thousands of bacteria. Relating these complex self-organization patterns to the behavior of individual cells is a complex-reverse engineering problem that cannot be solved solely by experimental research. In collaboration with experimental colleagues, we use a combination of quantitative microscopy, image processing, agent-based modeling, and kinetic theory PDEs to uncover the mechanisms of emergent collective behaviors.

SNOLAB is the deepest cleanest lab in the world. Its location at 2 km underground in Sudbury, Canada, allows searches for hypothetical rare events that would provide a window beyond our Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. This talk will take you on a journey into some of the on-going activities in the lab, with emphasis on searches using xenon. The primary focus of our group is neutrinoless double beta decay (0vbb) in Xe-136. If observed, this process would show for the first time violation of the lepton number conservation, a global symmetry of the SM. SNOLAB’s Cryopit is the intended home for nEXO, a liquid xenon time-project chamber with a sensitivity of the order of 10^28 yr to 0vbb half-life. We will describe our contributions to this experiment that includes machine learning for data analysis and Monte Carlo simulations. This talk also covers our efforts to build a successor for this tonne-scale detector, the Xe-Still Project, that is investigating cryogenic distillation as an alternative for xenon enrichment.

As origens do Instituto de Física Teórica se encontram em um período especial da ciência e história brasileiras. No contexto particular de uma época de grandes transformações podem ser encontradas as raízes profundas do IFT: Qual era o panorama daquela época?; Porquê era necessária, na visão dos instituidores, a criação de uma instituição sob novos pilares de atuação?; Quais foram as dificuldades e os reveses encontrados após sua instalação?; Quais foram os desdobramentos que ocorreram ao longo do tempo? Sua consolidação e reconhecimento no panorama nacional e internacional foram o resultado de batalhas e enfrentamentos travados ao longo de muitos anos. As perspectivas futuras como um Instituto com características diferenciadas dentro da UNESP estão sendo construídas no presente momento.

The new science of Gravitational Wave Astronomy, risen with the detections of gravitational waves emitted by compact binary coalescences, has opened up new possibilities for scientific investigation also in cosmology and fundamental physics. In this colloquium, an overview will be given of the theoretical methods presently in place to improve the current analytic knowledge of waveform models, whose accuracy is crucial to maximizing the physics output of gravitational wave detections. In particular, it will be highlighted how techniques borrowed from effective field theory in particle physics enabled a deeper and more accurate understanding of the General Relativistic two-body problem.