Talks

We will talk about recent progress in NMR technologies simulating topological phases. We will describe how states are prepared, how they are evolved in time and various tricks that we can play with it, including measurements of topological properties such as modular matrices, and thus potentially applied for identifying phases of matter in future simulations.

Behind certain marginally trapped surfaces one can construct a geometry containing an extremal surface of equal, but not larger area. This construction underlies the Engelhardt-Wall proposal for explaining the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy as a coarse-grained entropy. The construction can be proven to exist classically but fails if the Null Energy Condition is violated. Here we extend the coarse-graining construction to semiclassical gravity. Its validity is conjectural, but we are able to extract an interesting nongravitational limit. Our proposal implies Wall’s ant conjecture on the minimum energy of a completion of a quantum field theory state on a halfspace. It further constrains the properties of the minimum energy state; for example, the minimum completion energy must be localized as a shock at the cut. We verify that the predicted properties hold in a recent explicit construction of Ceyhan and Faulkner, which proves our conjecture in the nongravitational limit.

Machine learning has led to recent advancements in image processing, language translation, finance, robotics, musical and visual arts, and medical diagnosis. In this session, we will explore how machine learning can be applied within fields of physics. We will introduce fundamental concepts in machine learning such a neural networks and supervised vs. unsupervised learning, and then proceed to learn to use tools from Python's TensorFlow library.

Bring your laptop. You can attend remotely via Zoom <https://zoom.us/j/154009181>.

Ghostly neutrino particles continue to bring surprises to fundamental physics, from their existence to the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation which implies that their masses are nonzero. Their exact masses, among the most curious unknowns beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, can soon be probed by the joint analysis of upcoming cosmological surveys including LSST, Euclid, WFIRST, Simons Observatory, and CMB-S4. In this talk, I will first discuss ongoing work studying the effects of massive neutrinos. I will then turn the focus to my major efforts of modeling the challenging nonlinear regime of cosmic structures (<10 Mpc) where neutrino effects are the strongest. Finally, I will draw a roadmap to pin down the neutrino mass over the next decade.

We give a quantum speedup for solving the canonical semidefinite programming relaxation for binary quadratic optimization. The class of relaxations for combinatorial optimization has so far eluded quantum speedups. Our methods combine ideas from quantum Gibbs sampling and matrix exponent updates. A de-quantization of the algorithm also leads to a faster classical solver. For generic instances, our quantum solver gives a nearly quadratic speedup over state-of-the-art algorithms.
This is joint work with Fernando Brandao (Caltech) and Daniel Stilck Franca (QMATH, Copenhagen).