Talks

CHIME is a new interferometric telescope at radio frequencies 400-800 MHz.  The mapping speed (or total statistical power) of CHIME is among the largest of any radio telescope in the world, and the technology powering CHIME could be used to build telescopes which are orders of magnitude more powerful.  This breakthrough sensitivity has the power to revolutionize radio astronomy, but meeting the computational challenges will require breakthroughs on the algorithmic side.  I'll give a status update on CHIME, with an emphasis on new algorithms being developed to search for fast radio bursts and pulsars.

We will describe a formulation of the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism using derived symplectic geometry.  In this setting, the classical master equation of the BV formalism describes a space of coisotropic structures.  Using this approach, we resolve a conjecture of Felder-Kazhdan regarding BRST cohomology.  Time permitting, we will also describe applications of these ideas to more general quantization problems.

Since its first discovery in 1986, high-Tc superconductors have been attracting constant interests and meticulous efforts from both theorists and experimentalists, not merely due to its large transition temperature, but also because it offers a well characterized laboratory for the study of exotic phenomena such as quantum criticality, non-Fermi liquid behavior, and intertwined orders. One pressing question in the field is the role played by disorder:

inevitable in real materials, disorder is able to fundamentally alter the properties of the system under certain circumstances. In this talk, we will discuss from a theoretical point of view, how different types of disorders affect various electronic orders in copper-based high-Tc superconductors. We also discuss the implications in experiments, and investigate the possibility of generalizing our conclusions to a variety of other physical systems.