Physics

Niels Bohr was Nobel-winning physicist – a pioneer of quantum theory – but his influence extended far beyond his own research. He was a gifted teacher who established one of the 20th century’s most important centres for physics, and was instrumental in the development of physics worldwide. He became a statesman following the Second World War, calling for international cooperation to avoid nuclear conflict. Bohr’s legacy – in science, humanitarianism, and family – spans generations, as his grandson will illustrate during a special public lecture webcast at Perimeter Institute. Dr. Vilhelm Bohr, a researcher at the National Institute on Aging in Maryland and Chairman of the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen, will provide unique insights into his grandfather’s multifaceted personality, as well as the important influence of Niels Bohr’s father, wife, and brother.

Entropy comes up all over physics and mathematics in many different guises. However, as one tries to understand its conceptual meaning, entropy often evades the question by shifting into a different shape. Here, I will try to capture the beast by surrounding it from all sides. Assistance by the audience will increase the chance of success.

Most of the matter in the Universe is dark; determining the composition and interactions of this dark matter is among the defining challenges in particle physics today. I will briefly summarize the present status of dark matter searches and the case for exploration beyond the WIMP paradigm, particularly “light dark matter” close to but beneath the weak scale. I will define sharp milestones in sensitivity needed to decisively explore the best-motivated light dark matter scenarios, and describe experimental techniques to reach these milestones over the next several years.

The spatially-indirect exciton condensates (SIXC) is an interesting ordered electronic state in which coherence is spontaneously established between particles localized in separate two-dimensional layers. I will discuss some of the properties SIXCs, commenting on their counterflow superfluidity, their collective excitations, and on similarities and differences relative to superconductors, easy-plane ferromagnets and anti-ferromagnets, and the standard model of particle physics.  Finally I will discuss the prospects of achieving SIXC states at elevated temperatures in multi-layer 2D material systems.   

In the last few years there has been significant interest in the possible applications of gauge-gravity duality to condensed matter systems. In this talk I will discuss recent applications of these holographic techniques to strongly correlated systems out of equilibrium. I will argue that insights from general relativity, hydrodynamics and quantum field theory may be combined to yield quantitative predictions for quantum transport.

Over Twenty-five years into the internet era, over twenty years into the WorldWideWeb era, fifteen years into the Google era, and a few years past the Facebook/Twitter era, we've yet to converge on a new long-term methodology for scholarly research communication. I will provide a sociological overview of our current metastable state, and then a technical discussion of the practical implications of literature and usage data considered as computable objects, using arXiv as exemplar. From the physics standpoint, there is a surprising amount of statistical mechanics in text-mining and machine learning.

There is an analogy between the propagation of fields in the vicinity of astrophysical black holes and the that of small excitations in fluids and superfluids. This analogy allows one to test, challenge and verify, in tabletop experiments, the elusive processes of black hole mass and angular momentum loss.

I will first present a brief overview on analogue black hole experiments, and then discuss in more detail some of my earlier and more recent experimental and theoretical results on the subject.

Galileons are higher-derivative effective field theories with curious properties which have attracted much recent interest among cosmologists.  I will review their origins, their properties, their generalizations, and some recent developments.

Calculations in General Relativity inevitably involve tricky manipulations of tensor equations. In many cases, the tensor algebra involved is at best tedious and fraught with error, and at worst impossible. It is, however, ideally suited to implementation in a computer algebra system such as Mathematica. In this talk I will show how the xAct tensor algebra package can be used to make light work of difficult tensor calculations. I will illustrate its wide-reaching functionality using applications in my own research, with relevance to black hole perturbations, numerical relativity and quantum gravity.