Talks

The Hubble Space Telescope has completely revolutionized our understanding of the universe, and has become a beloved icon of popular culture. As revolutionary as Hubble has been, we have pushed it to its scientific limits in many ways. Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, has been in the works for almost two decades and is scheduled to launch in late 2018. It will be 100 times more powerful than Hubble. In her Perimeter Public Lecture, Dr. Amber Straughn will provide an update on the progress of building the world’s largest-yet space telescope, and will give an overview of the astronomical questions we hope to answer with Webb. These questions get to the heart of what it means to be human: Where did we come from? How did we get here? Are we alone?

By a celebrated theorem of Jacob Lurie, an extended TQFT is entirely determined by what it assigns to a point. It is natural to ask whether this theorem applies to TQFTs of physical interest. And, if yes, what do these theories assign to a point? In this talk, I will propose an answer for the case of 3-dimensional Chern-Simons theory. I will then
explore the relation to line defects in chiral WZW models, and boundary conditions for full WZW models. At last, I will present a conjectural classification of the above mentioned line defects and boundary conditions.

In this talk I will discuss how we might go about about performing a Bell experiment in which humans are used to decide the settings at each end.  The radical possibility we wish to investigate is that, when humans are used to decide the settings (rather than various types of random number generators), we might then expect to see a violation of Quantum Theory in agreement with the relevant Bell inequality.  Such a result, while very unlikely, would be tremendously significant for our understanding of the world (and I will discuss some interpretations).  

Possible radical implications aside, performing an experiment like this would push the development of new technologies.  The biggest problem would be to get sufficiently high rates wherein there has been a human induced switch at each end before a signal as to the new value of the setting could be communicated to the other end and, at the same time, a photon pair is detected.   It looks like an experiment like this, while challenging, is just about feasible with current technologies.  

I will discuss a new class of supersymmetric Wilson loop operators in pure N=2 Yang-Mills-Chern-Simons theory. These Wilson loops preserve one supercharge on-shell and wrap arbitrary Legendrian knots in the standard contact R^3.  I will also explain a relation, motivated by a global picture of contact three-manifolds, between these loop operators and chiral current algebra in two dimensions.  This talk is directly related to, but independent of, my preceding Friday talk in the Mathematical Physics seminar.

A closed quantum system is ergodic and satisfies equilibrium statistical physics when it completely loses local information of its initial condition under time evolution, by 'hiding' the information in non-local properties like entanglement. In the last decade, a flurry of theoretical work has shown that ergodicity can be broken in an isolated, quantum many-body system even at high energies in the presence of disorder, a phenomena known as many-body localization (MBL). In this novel phase of matter, highly excited states of an interacting system can serve as quantum memory and even protect exotic forms of quantum order. Recent claims of experimental observation of MBL in two dimensions using ultra-cold atoms has further raised a plethora of intriguing questions.

In one dimension, the strongly localized regime is described in terms of quasi-local integrals of motion, also known as l-bits. Based on this picture I will describe an efficient tensor network method to efficiently represent the entire spectrum of fully many-body localized systems. This ansatz is also successful at capturing features of the MBL to thermal transition. For higher dimensions, I will develop a refined phenomenology of MBL in terms of l*-bits which are only 'approximately' conserved, based on the stability of the localized phase to perturbations on the boundary. I will conclude with a bird's-eye view of some of the open problems in this rapidly growing field.