Talks

Soon after Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) was shown to exhibit asymptotic freedom at short distances, it was realized that it might be possible to create a new form of matter at high temperatures (T „d 150 MeV) in which hadrons dissolve and quarks and gluons become locally deconfined. Experiments have been carried out for the last two decades attempting to create this new form of matter, called ¡§quark-gluon plasma¡¨ (QGP), via high-energy collisions of large nuclei. In 2000, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) started operation at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US and results obtained from the first five years of RHIC operation provide the first convincing evidence for creation of the quark-gluon plasma in the laboratory. Measurements at RHIC show that the QGP is opaque to the passage of high-energy quarks and gluons and that interactions between the quarks and gluons in the QGP appears to be much stronger than initially expected. The estimated viscosity to entropy ratio of the QGP has been interpreted as showing that the QGP produced at RHIC is the most perfect fluid ever observed in the laboratory. Measurements from RHIC also suggest that the strong, coherent gluon fields in the incident nuclei play a significant role in the initial particle production and early evolution of the quark gluon plasma. Within the next few years, the large hadron collider will provide Pb+Pb collisions at a nucleon-nucleon center of mass energy of 5.5 TeV, thus opening a new frontier in the study of the QGP. I will provide a summary of the key experimental observables at RHIC, a discussion of their canonical interpretation and then discuss how measurements at the LHC can be used to test these interpretations.

The duality between theories of quantum strings and Yang-Mills gauge theories, in particular the AdS/CFT conjecture, has over the years given rise to many important physical insights. Recently, the realization that both sides of the duality, in certain limits, can be be described by integrable systems has lead to a good deal of progress. In this talk we will review the construction of these integrable structures and their usefulness in understanding strings in curved backgrounds/strongly coupled gauge theories. We will discuss how the asymptotic S-matrix that enters the Bethe equations for gauge theory anomalous dimensions provides a very convenient description of the system and how it can be reproduced from the classical string theory. Further, we will outline some partial attempts to extend this equivalence, and the corresponding integrable structures, to include world-sheet quantum loop effects.

I first summarize how the recent avalanche of precision measurements involving the cosmic microwave background, galaxy clustering, the Lyman alpha forest, gravitational lensing, supernovae Ia and other tools probes has transformed our understanding of our universe. I then discuss key open problems such as the nature of dark matter, dark energy and the early universe.

With a cosmic flight simulator, we'll take a scenic journey through space and time. After exploring our local Galactic neighborhood, we'll travel back 13.7 billion years to explore the Big Bang itself and how state-of-the-art measurements are transforming our understanding of our cosmic origin and ultimate fate. We then turn to the question of whether this can all be described purely mathematically, and discuss implications ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters and initial conditions to broader issues like parallel universes, simulations and and Goedel incompleteness.

Cosmology ultimately aims to explain the initial conditions at the beginning of time and the entire subsequent evolution of the universe. The "beginning of time" can be understood in the Wheeler-DeWitt approach to quantum gravity, where homogeneous universes are described by a Schroedinger equation with a potential barrier. Quantum tunneling through the barrier is interpreted as a spontaneous creation of a small (Planck-size) closed universe, which then enters the regime of cosmological inflation and reaches an extremely large size. After sufficient growth, the universe can be adequately described as a classical spacetime with quantum matter. The initial quantum state of matter in the created universe can be determined by solving the Schroedinger equation with appropriate boundary conditions. I show that the most likely initial state is close to the vacuum state. This is the initial condition for inflation favored both by observational data and theoretical considerations.