Physics

Imagine going beyond treating the symptoms of disease and instead stopping it and reversing it. This is the promise of regenerative medicine.

In her Perimeter Institute public lecture, Prof. Molly Shoichet will tell three compelling stories that are relevant to cancer, blindness and stroke. In each story, the underlying innovation in chemistry, engineering, and biology will be highlighted with the opportunities that lay ahead. 

To make it personal, Shoichet’s lab has figured out how to grow cells in an environment that mimics that of the native environment. Now she has the opportunity to grow a patient’s cancer cells in the lab and figure out which drugs will be most effective for that individual. 

In blindness, the cells at the back of the eye often die. We can slow the progression of disease but we cannot stop it because there is no way to replace those cells. With a newly engineered biomaterial, Shoichet’s lab can now transplant cells to the back of the eye and achieve some functional repair. 

The holy grail of regenerative medicine is stimulation of the stem cells resident in us. The challenge is to figure out how to stimulate those cells to promote repair. Using a drug-infused “band-aid” applied directly on the brain, Shoichet’s team achieved tissue repair. 

These three stories underline the opportunity of collaborative, multi-disciplinary research. It is exciting to think what we will discover as this research continues to unfold.

 Non-Fermi liquids are exotic metallic states which do not support well defined quasiparticles. Due to strong quantum fluctuations and the presence of extensive gapless modes near the Fermi surface, it has been difficult to understand universal low energy properties of non-Fermi liquids reliably.  In this talk, we will discuss recent progress made on field theories for non-Fermi liquids. Based on a dimensional regularization scheme which tunes the number of co-dimensions of Fermi surface, critical exponents that control scaling behaviors of physical observables can be computed in controlled ways. The systematic expansion also provides important insight into strongly interacting metals. This allows us find the non-perturbative solution for the strange metal realized at the antiferromagnetic quantum critical point in 2+1 dimensions and predict the exact critical exponents.

In recent years, precise cosmological measurements have provided strong evidence for new physics beyond the Standard Model, occurring both in the very early universe and also today.  In the near future, large-scale galaxy surveys will open another window on many different areas of physics, including tests of gravity, probes of dark energy, and cosmic inflation.  However, interpreting galaxy surveys presents new challenges, because galaxies are sensitive to astrophysics that are unimportant for the cosmic microwave background.  I will discuss how galaxies may be used to study cosmology, and will argue that the messy astrophysics in galaxies actually offers entirely new probes of fundamental physics.  I will illustrate this with 3 examples, related to inflation, neutrino masses, and the properties of dark matter.

I will argue that the standard model contains a rather strong hint that -- instead of being simply an ordinary continuous 4D manifold -- spacetime is actually the product of a 4D manifold and a certain discrete/finite 6D space (i.e. there are 6D discrete/finite "extra dimensions").  I will introduce this idea and the evidence for it in simple way, and then discuss various outstanding puzzles and future directions.

Information theory establishes the fundamental limits on data transmission, storage, and processing. Quantum information theory unites information theoretic ideas with an accurate quantum-mechanical description of reality to give a more accurate and complete theory with new and more powerful possibilities for information processing. The goal of both classical and quantum information theory is to quantify the optimal rates of interconversion of different resources. These rates are usually characterized in terms of entropies. However, nonadditivity of many entropic formulas often makes finding answers to information theoretic questions intractable. In a few auspicious cases, such as the classical capacity of a classical channel, the capacity region of a multiple access channel and the entanglement assisted capacity of a quantum channel, additivity allows a full characterization of optimal rates. Here we present a new mathematical property of entropic formulas, uniform additivity, that is both easily evaluated and rich enough to capture all known quantum additive formulas. We give a complete characterization of uniformly additive functions using the linear programming approach to entropy inequalities. In addition to all known quantum formulas, we find a new and intriguing additive quantity: the completely coherent information. We also uncover a remarkable coincidence---the classical and quantum uniformly additive functions are identical; the tractable answers in classical and quantum information theory are formally equivalent.

A central question in quantum computation is to identify which problems can be solved faster on a quantum computer. A Holy Grail of the field would be to have a theory of quantum speed-ups that delineates the physical mechanisms sustaining quantum speed-ups and helps in the design of new quantum algorithms. In this talk, we present such a toy theory for the study of a class of quantum algorithms for algebraic problems, including Shor’s celebrated factoring algorithm. Our theory is an extension of Gottesman’s stabilizer formalism based on elements of group and hypergroup theory. Using our methods, we develop classical simulation algorithms for Clifford-like circuits containing quantum Fourier transforms as well as new quantum algorithms for hidden symmetries and hyper-symmertry problems. During the talk, we will discuss the role of resources such as entanglement, interference and contextuality within our formalism and connect quantum speed-ups therein to the presence of precise algebraic structures.

Based on the following works:

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3637
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3208
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.4800
[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05806

Tensor networks offer an efficient representation of many-body wave-functions in an exponentially large Hilbert space by exploiting the area law of ground state quantum entanglement. I will start with a gentle introduction to the tensor network formalism. Then I will describe its application to realizing Wilson's renormalization group directly on quantum lattice models (e.g. quantum spin chains), with emphasis on the RG fixed points corresponding to conformal field theories. We will see how to define both global and local scale transformations on the lattice in such a way that, intriguingly, conformal invariance can be tested (and conformal data extracted) right at the UV cut-off scale.

When small, hard particles are suspended in a fluid, they make it more resistant to flow. The higher the particle concentration, the higher the viscosity. Add enough particles and fluid stops flowing entirely, becoming a jammed solid - this makes intuitive sense.

Less intuitive and more intriguing are suspensions that flow smoothly if pushed gently, but that suddenly solidify if you push too hard. This behaviour is called Discontinuous Shear Thickening (DST). You can try it yourself by mixing cornstarch with water - in the right proportions, the mixture will flow smoothly when stirred gently, but will refuse to flow at all if stirred too hard.

More than an interesting kitchen trick, DST has important real-world consequences. It can cause catastrophic failure of industrial pumping equipment, but can also have life-saving applications to bulletproof vests.

For many years, the mechanism behind DST was unclear, but we have very recently found a new and stunningly simple explanation based on the idea that the contacts between particles become less lubricated and more frictional as the force between them increases. Although this dependence is typically gradual, when a fluid gets close to the “jamming” point, global instabilities can result in the sudden switching from liquid to solid.

Michael Cates (Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, University of Cambridge) will explain this peculiar form of “bulletproof custard” with a few equations, plenty of diagrams, and even some hands-on demonstrations.

Scale invariant transfer matrices and Hamiltonians Abstract We investigate the possibility of strictly scale invariant transfer matrices in quantum spin chains based on a certain planar algebra, both as operators and as quadratic forms.

Recent explorations of the space of quantum field theories have provided novel topological and geometric information about this space. This voyage has resulted in the solution of some long-standing questions:  the computation of sought-after topological invariants (Gromov-Witten invariants) by a new physics-based approach, the first instance of exact correlation functions in a four-dimensional QFT and the unearthing of the action of dualities on the basic observables of three dimensional gauge theories.

Experimentalists are getting better and better at building qubits, but no matter how hard they try, their qubits will never be perfect.  In order to build a large quantum computer, we will almost certainly need to encode the qubits using quantum error-correcting codes and encode the quantum circuits using fault-tolerant protocols.  This will eventually allow reliable quantum computation even when the individual components are imperfect.  I will review the current state of the art of quantum fault tolerance and discuss progress towards answering the most important questions that will enable large fault-tolerant quantum computers.