Talks

Universality, real-space renormalization for the vortex gas (Lauren's Lecture Notes)

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, winner of the 2018 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, is an accomplished scientist and champion for women in physics. As a graduate student in 1967, she co-discovered pulsars, a breakthrough widely considered one of the most important scientific advances of the 20th century. When the discovery of pulsars was recognized with the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, the award went to her graduate advisor. Undaunted, she persevered and became one of the most prominent researchers in her field and an advocate for women and other under-represented groups in physics.

She plans to use the $3 million Breakthrough Prize to fund women and other under-represented groups pursuing physics to bring greater diversity to the field.

We  find an  approximation of  the induced spatial distance on a Cauchy hypersurface using only the causal structure and local volume element. The approximation can be made arbitrarily precise for a globally hyperbolic spacetime with compact Cauchy hypersurfaces. This prescription has a discrete analog which we use to evaluate the induced spatial distance in a continuum-like causal set.  As expected, because of  discrete asymptotic silence, this gives a poor approximation to the continuum distance in the "UV".  For larger distances, on the other hand, the approximation works very well, as long as the discreteness scale is significantly smaller than the extrinsic and intrinsic curvature scale of the spatial hypersurface. This paves the way for obtaining detailed spatial geometric information from the causal structure, which has implications for the continuum approximation of causal set theory. 

Other models in the same universality class as the XY model: Coulomb gas, fluctuating surface (solid-on-solid) model (Lauren's Lecture Notes)

The spectral gap problem consist in deciding, given a local interaction, whether the corresponding translationally invariant Hamiltonian on a lattice has a spectral gap independent of the system size or not. In the simplest case of nearest-neighbour frustration-free qubit interactions, there is a complete classification. On the other extreme, for two (or higher) dimensional models with nearest-neighbour interactions this problem can be reduced to the Halting Problem, and it is therefore undecidable.

There are a lot of indications that one dimensional spin chain are relatively simpler than their counterparts in higher dimensions. Nonetheless, I will present a construction of a family of nearest-neighbour, translationally invariant Hamiltonians on a spin chain, for which the spectral gap problem is undecidable.

The basic geometry of the Solar System - the shapes, spacings, and

orientations of the planetary orbits - has long been a subject of

fascination as well as inspiration for planet-formation theories. For

exoplanetary systems, those same properties have only recently come

into focus. I will review our current knowledge of the occurrence of

planets around other stars, their orbital distances and

eccentricities, the orbital spacings and mutual inclinations in

multiplanet systems, the orientation of the host star's rotation axis,

and the properties of planets in binary-star systems. I will also

discuss opportunities to improve our understanding, with data from the

recently launched Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) is an imaging camera mounted at the Prime Focus of the Subaru 8.2-m telescope operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan on the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii. A consortium of astronomers from Japan, Taiwan and Princeton University is carrying out a three-layer, 300-night, multiband survey from 2014-2019 with this instrument. In this talk, I will focus on the HSC survey Wide Layer, which will cover 1400 square degrees in five broad bands (grizy), to a 5 sigma point-source depth of r~26. We have covered 240 square degrees of the Wide Layer in all five bands, and the median seeing in the i band is 0.60 arcseconds. This powerful combination of depth and image quality makes the HSC survey unique compared to other ongoing imaging surveys. In this talk I will describe the HSC survey dataset and the completed and ongoing science analyses with the survey Wide layer, including galaxy studies, strong and weak gravitational lensing, but with an emphasis on weak lensing. I will demonstrate the level of systematics control, the latest cosmology results, and describe some lessons learned that will be of use for other ongoing and future lensing surveys.