Physics

It was during his stay in Prague when Einstein started in earnest to develop his ideas about general relativity. I will evoke those days in 1911 and 1912, discuss Einstein's papers on gravitation from that period, emphasize which new concepts and ideas he introduced. I also want to show you how the main themes that preoccupied him then, the principle of equivalence, bending of light, gravitational redshift and frame dragging effects are still alive in contemporary relativity.

Computing has had many fundamental platform shifts in its history, and each came shrouded with mystery, hype, and dazzling potential: Alan Turing's universal machines, Doug Engelbart's Dynamic Knowledge Repository, J.C.R. Licklider's Intergalactic Network, the development of the internet, and all the waves of personal computers. More recently, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and now Web 3.0 have all been heralded with barely-working demos and baffling hype, only to quietly install and broadly distribute fundamental improvements to our everyday life, to our work, and to our society. Each time the smoke cleared, our civilization had been transformed.

Right now, there are fundamental improvements being designed, built, and deployed in the web 3.0 landscape. These improvements and the applications they enable have the potential to transform our lives, our societies, and our civilization yet again. Some of those changes have started to happen, but the vast majority loom in the horizon. To understand the potential changes to our future, we must first understand what the technologies are, what properties they have, and what applications and actions they enable. After looking at the pieces concretely, both in theory and in practice, we can then put the puzzle of the future back together.

This colloquium will explore:

- What web 3.0 is, and its key technologies
- Decentralized Web systems, and their applications
- Blockchain systems, as a next generation platform for computing
- Cryptocurrencies, and the systems they enable
- Smart contracts and autonomous programs
- Cryptoeconomics and incentive structure engineering
- Open Services -- open source internet-wide utilities
- and a set of Open Problems in the field.

Embezzlement of entanglement is the (impossible) task of producing an entangled state from a product state via a local change of basis, when a suitable catalytic entangled state is available.  The possibility to approximate this task was first observed by van Dam and Hayden in 2002.  Since then, the phenomenon is found to play crucial roles in many aspects of quantum information theory.  In this colloquium, we will explain various methods to embezzlement entanglement and explore applications (such as an extension to approximately violate other conservation laws, a Bell inequality that cannot be violated maximally with finite amount of entanglement, consequences for resource theories, and the quantum reverse Shannon theorem).

Einstein is well known for his rejection of quantum mechanics in the form it emerged from the work of Heisenberg, Born and Schrodinger in 1926. Much less appreciated are the many seminal contributions he made to quantum theory prior to his final scientific verdict: that the theory was at best incomplete. In this talk I present an overview of Einstein’s many conceptual breakthroughs and place them in historical context. I argue that Einstein, much more than Planck, introduced the concept of quantization of energy in atomic mechanics. Einstein proposed the photon, the first force-carrying particle discovered for a fundamental interaction, and put forward the notion of wave-particle duality, based on sound statistical arguments 14 years before De Broglie’s work. He was the first to recognize the intrinsic randomness in atomic processes, and introduced the notion of transition probabilities, embodied in the A and B coefficients for atomic emission and absorption. He also preceded Born in suggesting the interpretation of wave fields as probability densities for particles, photons, in the case of the electromagnetic field. Finally, stimulated by Bose, he introduced the notion of indistinguishable particles in the quantum sense and derived the condensed phase of bosons, which is one of the fundamental states of matter at low temperatures. His work on quantum statistics in turn directly stimulated Schrodinger towards his discovery of the wave equation of quantum mechanics. It was only due to his rejection of the final theory that he is not generally recognized as the most central figure in this historic achievement of human civilization.   

Gauge theories are fundamental to our understanding of interactions between the elementary constituents of matter as mediated by gauge bosons. However, computing the real-time dynamics in gauge theories is a notorious challenge for classical computational methods. In the spirit of Feynman's vision of a quantum simulator, this has recently stimulated theoretical effort to devise schemes for simulating such theories on engineered quantum-mechanical devices, with the difficulty that gauge invariance and the associated local conservation laws (Gauss laws) need to be implemented. Here we report the first digital quantum simulation of a lattice gauge theory, by realising 1+1-dimensional quantum electrodynamics (Schwinger model) on a few-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer. We are interested in the real-time evolution of the Schwinger mechanism, describing the instability of the bare vacuum due to quantum fluctuations, which manifests itself in the spontaneous creation of electron-positron pairs. Our work represents a first step towards quantum simulating high-energy theories with atomic physics experiments, the long-term vision being the extension to real-time quantum simulations of non-Abelian lattice gauge theories. 

Computing vacuum expectation values is paramount in studying Quantum Field Theories (QFTs) since they provide relevant information for comparing the underlying theory with experimental results. However, unless the ground state of the system is explicitly known, such computations are very difficult and Monte Carlo simulations generally run months to years on state-of-the-art high performance computers. Additionally, there are various physically interesting situations, in which most numerical methods currently in use are not applicable at all (e.g., the early universe or setting requiring Lorentzian backgrounds). Thus, new algorithms are required to address such problems in QFT. In recent joint work with K. Jansen (NIC, DESY Zeuthen), I have shown that zeta-functions of Fourier integral operators can be applied to regularize vacuum expectation values with Euclidean and Lorentzian backgrounds and that these zeta-regularized vacuum expectation values are in fact physically meaningful. In order to prove physicality, we introduced a discretization scheme which is accessible on a quantum computer. Using this discretization scheme, we can efficiently approximate ground states on a quantum device and henceforth compute vacuum expectation values. Furthermore, the Fourier integral operator $\zeta$-function approach is applicable to Lattice formulations in Lorentzian background. 

Over the years, many rich ideas have been exchanged between particle theory and condensed matter theory, such as particle/hole theory, superconductivity and dynamical symmetry breaking, universality and critical phenomena. Here I discuss the interesting case of how the two fields converged independently along different paths on the physics of symmetry-protected topological order: condensed matter physicists motivated by the quantum Hall effect and superconductivity, the particle physicists driven by the desire to understand anomalies and chirality, and to compute QCD and supersymmetry on a lattice -- where the Quantum Hall effect, the Quantum Spin Hall effect and Majorana surface modes have all played a role in practical computations since the 1990s.  

So far artificial neural networks have been applied to discover phase diagrams in many different physical models. However, none of these studies have revealed any fundamentally new physics. A major problem is that these neural networks are mainly considered as black box algorithms. On the journey to detect new physics it is important to interpret what artificial neural networks learn. On the one hand this allows us to judge whether to trust the results, and on the other hand this can give us insight to possible new physics. In this talk I will 
discuss applications to different models where we successfully interpreted what was learned by the neural networks.

In some of the planet's most extreme environments scientists are constructing enormous detectors to study the very rare interactions produced by neutrinos. In particular, at South Pole Station Antarctica more than a cubic kilometer of the deep glacial ice has been instrumented to construct the world's largest neutrino detector to date: the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.  Designed to detect the highest energy neutrinos expected to be produced in astrophysical processes, IceCube has established a vibrant scientific program that has begun to revolutionize the fields of particle and astro-physics. In this talk I will present some of the most recent results from this new window to the Universe, and will discuss the plans underway to significantly enhance its long-term future reach. 

Despite intensive theoretical research for several decades, the theory of quantum gravity remains elusive. I will review the obstacles that prevent from reconciling the principles of general relativity with those of quantum mechanics. It is plausible that an eventual ultraviolet completion of general relativity will require sacrificing some of these principles. I will then focus on the class of theories where the abandoned property is local Lorentz invariance, replaced by an approximate anisotropic scaling symmetry in deep ultraviolet. At low energies these theories reduce to a special type of scalar — tensor gravity. I will show that this approach allows us to construct renormalizable gravitational theories in any number of spacetime dimensions. The study of a (2+1) dimensional model reveals its asymptotic freedom and suggests that this property may be generic for gravity with anisotropic scaling. Relevance of these results for gravity in the real world will be discussed.

We compute the partition function of a massive free boson in a square lattice using a tensor network algorithm. We introduce a singular value decomposition (SVD) of continuous matrices that leads to very accurate numerical results. It is shown the emergence of a CDL fixed point structure. In the massless limit, we reproduce the results of conformal field theory including a precise value of the central charge.

Hidden sector particles, with masses and couplings below those of the weak interactions, can resolve many of the outstanding questions of the Standard Model, including the identity of dark matter, the origin of the baryon asymmetry, and the physics of neutrino masses. Existing searches at colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider are, however, often insensitive to signals of hidden sectors. Using the well-motivated example of low-scale leptogenesis and neutrino masses, I will demonstrate connections between the cosmology of hidden sectors and their signatures in experiments. I will then present new experimental ideas for how to uncover the existence of hidden sectors at the LHC, as well as my role in founding and leading a joint theory-experiment initiative working to greatly expand sensitivity to long-lived particles  Finally, I will discuss my theoretical and experimental work on low-energy colliders such as B factories, which have an immense and under-utilized potential for discovering hidden particles. Given the many connections between colliders, astrophysics, cosmology, and other terrestrial experiments emerging from the study of hidden sectors, the future is bright for expanding our knowledge of the hidden universe.