Talks

Take a musical journey of the mind and the cosmos on April 14 when scientist Stephon Alexander presents a live talk at Perimeter Institute called The Jazz of Physics. 

Alexander, a professor of physics at Brown University, began his journey to science in high school where he encountered a teacher who believed in his potential and introduced him to the magic of jazz, fostering a connection between John Coltrane and Albert Einstein.

He'll demonstrate how the search for answers to deep cosmological puzzles has parallels to  jazz improvisation. He will also explore new ways that music, in particular jazz, mirrors concepts in modern physics such as quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the early universe. 

Free tickets to attend in person will become available on Monday, April 3 at 9 am ET.

Perimeter Institute tickets: www.perimeterinstitute.ca/tickets

The (derived) geometric Satake equivalence plays a central role in the geometric Langlands program: roughly, it describes the category of constructible sheaves of C-vector spaces on Bun_G(S^2) in terms of the Langlands dual group G^. In this talk, I will describe some ideas connecting chromatic homotopy theory to the derived geometric Satake equivalence. For example, we will describe the category of locally constant sheaves of A-modules on Bun_G(S^2), where A is complex K-theory or an elliptic cohomology theory, in Langlands
dual terms. Some of this work was motivated by considerations from physics, and I hope to say what little I know about this, as well as sketch its relationship to the Ben-Zvi-Sakellaridis-Venkatesh program.

Zoom Link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94926220665?pwd=bVZFUFlvZGxVSG0xUFc1SGNaTDBKZz09

Chern-Simons theories can possess 't Hooft anomalies for time-reversal symmetry. In this talk, we will discuss abelian Chern-Simons theories with an interesting time-reversal symmetry algebra and compute the classification of the anomaly, which is captured by a bordism group. In order to get the classification correct I will explain the argument we used that utilized the Smith homomorphism for bordism groups. In order to compute the value of the anomaly we study the Atiyah-Hirzebruch spectral sequence and find a way to trivialize each layer of the anomaly. I will also discuss the generating manifold for the corresponding bordism group, and how it arises from the Smith homomorphism. The knowledge of this manifold allows one to compute the partition function by using the data that characterizes the Chern-Simons theory and the symmetry actions; this gives a robust check of our answer for the anomaly. This is based on work in progress with Arun Debray and Weicheng Ye. 

Zoom link:  TBA