Conference

This lecture is devoted to Noether’s theorems and the study of the interplay between symmetries and conservation laws, from ordinary mechanics to general relativity. In order to start on a common ground and interest a broad audience, we will begin with a review of Noether’s (first) theorem in ordinary non-relativistic mechanics. This will enable us to settle some subtleties, agree on conventions, and especially explore some curious and lesser-known symmetry features of familiar models (such as particles and celestial mechanics). We will then move on to field theory, and discuss the construction of conserved currents and energy-momentum tensors. This will include a discussion of conserved quantities in general relativity. Finally, we will turn to the core of the topic, which is Noether’s (second) theorem for gauge symmetries. After recalling the basic properties of gauge theories in Lagrangian and Hamiltonian form, we will derive the consequences of gauge symmetry for the construction of conserved charges. For this, we will introduce the so-called covariant phase space formalism, which enables to construct symmetry charges and algebras, and derive (non) conservation laws. This will be illustrated in Maxwell’s theory and in general relativity. In particular, we will focus in depth on the example of three-dimensional gravity as an exactly soluble model in which all aspects of symmetries can be understood. We will end with an outlook towards the notion of asymptotic symmetries and their use in classical and quantum gravity. Ideally, the audience should be familiar with: Hamiltonian mechanics differential forms basic features of general relativity

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.

QuEra is a quantum computing start up located in Boston, spinning off from the groups in the physics and engineering departments of Harvard and MIT. I have spent this fall working at QuEra and will introduce you to the company and its neutral-atom quantum computing technology.

"Motivated by applications in machine learning, we present a quantum algorithm for Gibbs sampling from continuous real-valued functions defined on high dimensional tori. We show that these families of functions satisfy a Poincare inequality. We then use the techniques for solving linear systems and partial differential equations to design an algorithm that performs zeroeth order queries to a quantum oracle computing the energy function to return samples from its Gibbs distribution. We further analyze the query and gate complexity of our algorithm and prove that the algorithm has a polylogarithmic dependence on approximation error (in total variation distance) and a polynomial dependence on the number of variables, although it suffers from an exponentially poor dependence on temperature."