The National Ignition Facility (NIF):Pathway to Energy Security and Physics of the Cosmos
Edward Moses Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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Cosmological constraints on complex scalar-field dark matter
Tanja Rindler-Daller University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
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Time, Dynamics, Chaos, and the Brain
Dean Buonomano University of California, Los Angeles
PIRSA:13010117 -
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Wilson Lines in Higher Spin Gravity
Alejandra Castro University of Cambridge
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Does the Quantum Particle know its own Energy?
Rafael Sorkin Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
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Boundaries and Defects in 4d N=4 SYM
Masahito Yamazaki University of Tokyo
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The National Ignition Facility (NIF):Pathway to Energy Security and Physics of the Cosmos
Edward Moses Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
NIF is the world's most energetic laser system capable of producing over 1.8 MJ and 500 TW of ultraviolet light, about 100 times more than any other operating laser of its kind. This talk describes the unprecedented experimental capabilities of NIF, its role in fundamental science, the pathway to achieving fusion ignition and energy security missions, and the status of progress in these areas. -
Towards a 1/c Expansion in 2d Conformal Field Theory
I will describe progress in deriving 3d gravity directly from 2d conformal field theory at large central charge 'c'. In a large class of CFTs, using general arguments like modular invariance, crossing symmetry, and the OPE expansion, the spectrum, the entanglement entropy, and certain partition functions can be computed to leading order in a 1/c expansion. The results agree with universal features of 3d gravity required by black hole thermodynamics and the Ryu-Takayanagi formula; furthermore, the relevant 3d geometries appear automatically from CFT calculations in this regime. -
Cosmological constraints on complex scalar-field dark matter
Tanja Rindler-Daller University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
The nature of dark matter is a fundamental problem in cosmology and particle physics. Many particle candidates have been devised over the course of the last decades, and are still at stake to be soon discovered or rejected. However, astronomical observations, in conjunction with the phenomenological efforts in astrophysical modeling, as well as in particle theories to explain them, have helped to pin down several key properties which any successful candidate has to have. In this talk, I will explore the possibility that dark matter is described by a complex scalar field (SFDM), while the other cosmic components are treated in the usual way, assuming a cosmological constant for the dark energy. We will see that the background evolution of a Universe with SFDM and a cosmological constant (LSFDM) complies with the concordance LCDM model, if the model parameters of the SFDM Lagrangian, mass and repulsive 2-particle self-interaction coupling strength, are properly constrained by observations of the cosmic microwave background and Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). However, not only does LSFDM lead to non-standard expansion histories prior to BBN, it also exemplifies differences at small scales, which could help to resolve the discrepancies found between LCDM and certain galaxy observations. I will highlight the differences between complex SFDM and dark matter described by real fields, as for instance axion-like particles. If time permits, I will also talk about possible implementations of SFDM in the very early Universe, in the wake of its inflationary phase. -
Black hole entropy and the case for self-dual loop quantum gravity
By focusing on aspects of black hole thermodynamics, I will present some evidences supporting the unexpected role of the complex self-dual variables in quantum gravity. This will also be the occasion of revisiting some aspects of three-dimensional gravity, and in particular the link between the BTZ black hole and the Turaev-Viro state sum model. Also the information on the website for next week needs to be modified: We will not have a seminar on Thursday (as Thursday is PI day). Instead, we will have the seminar on Wednesday, but actually would prefer a different time, namely 3.30 pm. -
Time, Dynamics, Chaos, and the Brain
Dean Buonomano University of California, Los Angeles
PIRSA:13010117Time poses a fundamental problem in neuroscience, in part, because at its core the brain is a prediction machine: the brain evolved to allow animals to anticipate, adapt, and prepare for future events. To accomplish this function the brain tells time on scales spanning 12 orders of magnitude. In contrast to most man made clocks that share a very simply underlying principle-counting the "tics" of an oscillator-evolution has devised many different solutions to the problem of telling time. On the scale of milliseconds and seconds experimental and computational evidence suggests that the brain relies on neural dynamics to tell time. For this strategy to work two conditions have to be met: the states of the neural network must evolve in a nonrepeating pattern over the relevant interval, and the sequence of states must be reproducible every time the system is reengaged. Recurrently connected networks of neurons can generate rich dynamics, but a long standing challenge is that the regimes that create computationally powerful dynamics are chaotic-and thus cannot generate reproducible patterns. We have recently demonstrated that by tuning the weights (the coupling coefficients) between the units of artificial neural networks it is possible to generate locally stable trajectories embedded within chaotic attractors. These stable patterns function as "dynamic attractors" and can be used to encode and tell time. They also exhibit a novel feature characteristic of biological systems: the ability to autonomously "return" to the pattern being generated in the face of perturbations. -
Mayer-Cluster Expansion of Instanton Partition Functions and Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz
Carlo Meneghelli University of Oxford
In arXiv:0908.4052, Nekrasov and Shatashvili pointed out that the N=2 instanton partition function in a special limit of the Omega-deformation parameters is characterized by certain thermodynamic Bethe ansatz (TBA) like equations.In this talk I will present an explicit derivation of this fact as well as generalizations to quiver gauge theories. The TBA equations derived entirely within gauge theory have been proposed to encode the spectrum of a large class of quantum integrable systems. I will conclude with some remarks on this correspondence. -
New light on 21cm intensity fluctuations from the dark ages
Fluctuations of the 21 cm brightness temperature before the formation of the first stars hold the promise of becoming a high-precision cosmological probe in the future. The growth of over densities is very well described by perturbation theory at that epoch and the signal can in principle be predicted to arbitrary accuracy for given cosmological parameters. Recently, Tseliakhovich and Hirata pointed out a previously neglected and important physical effect, due to the fact that baryons and cold dark matter (CDM) have supersonic relative velocities after recombination. This relative velocity suppresses the growth of matter fluctuations on scales k∼10−10^3 Mpc^−1. In addition, the amplitude of the small-scale power spectrum is modulated on the large scales over which the relative velocity varies, corresponding to k∼0.005−1 Mpc^−1. In this talk, I will describe the effect of the relative velocity on 21 cm brightness temperature fluctuations from redshifts z≥30. I will show that the 21 cm power spectrum is affected on most scales. On small scales, the signal is typically suppressed several tens of percent, except for extremely small scales (k≳2000 Mpc−1) for which the fluctuations are boosted by resonant excitation of acoustic waves. On large scales, 21 cm fluctuations are enhanced due to the non-linear dependence of the brightness temperature on the underlying gas density and temperature. The enhancement of the 21 cm power spectrum is of a few percent at k∼0.1 Mpc−1 and up to tens of percent at k≲0.005 Mpc−1, for standard ΛCDM cosmology. In principle this effect allows to probe the small-scale matter power spectrum not only through a measurement of small angular scales but also through its effect on large angular scales. -
Wilson Lines in Higher Spin Gravity
Alejandra Castro University of Cambridge
In this talk I will review the interpretation of Wilson line operators in the context of higher spin gravity in 2+1 dim and holography. I will show how a Wilson line encapsulates the thermodynamics of black holes. Furthermore it provides an elegant description of massive particles. This opens a new window of observables which will allow us to probe the true geometrical nature of higher spin gravity. -
Cosmic Variance from Superhorizon Mode Coupling
We observe a finite subvolume of the universe, so CMB and large scale structure data may give us either a representative or a biased sample of statistics in the larger universe. Mode coupling (non-Gaussianity) in the primordial perturbations can introduce a bias of parameters measured in any subvolume due to coupling to superhorizon background modes longer than the size of the subvolume. This leads to a "cosmic variance" of statistics on smaller scales, as the long-wavelength background modes vary around the global mean. We study this bias for local non-Gaussianity and quantify how observed statistics such as the power spectrum of the primordial perturbations, spectral index (scale-dependence in the power spectrum), amplitude of non-Gaussianity, dark matter halo power spectrum, and primordial tensor modes, can differ from the same quantities averaged throughout a volume much larger than the observable universe. More general kinds of mode coupling can change the relative sensitivity to different background modes. Finally, we consider what observations can tell us about the possibility of biasing from superhorizon modes." -
Hardness of correcting errors on a stabilizer code
Problems in computer science are often classified based on the scaling of the runtimes for algorithms that can solve the problem. Easy problems are efficiently solvable but often in physics we encounter problems that take too long to be solved on a classical computer. Here we look at one such problem in the context of quantum error correction. We will further show that no efficient algorithm for this problem is likely to exist. We will address the computational hardness of a decoding problem, pertaining to quantum stabilizer codes considering independent X and Z errors on each qubit. Much like classical linear codes, errors are detected by measuring certain check operators which yield an error syndrome, and the decoding problem consists of determining the most likely recovery given the syndrome. The corresponding classical problem is known to be NP-Complete, and a similar decoding problem for quantum codes is known to be NP-Complete too. However, this decoding strategy is not optimal in the quantum setting as it does not take into account error degeneracy, which causes distinct errors to have the same effect on the code. Here, we show that optimal decoding of stabilizer codes is computationally much harder than optimal decoding of classical linear codes, it is #P-Complete. -
Does the Quantum Particle know its own Energy?
Rafael Sorkin Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
If a wave function does not describe microscopic reality then what does? Reformulating quantum mechanics in path-integral terms leads to a notion of ``precluded event" and thence to the proposal that quantal reality differs from classical reality in the same way as a set of worldlines differs from a single worldline. One can then ask, for example, which sets of electron trajectories correspond to a Hydrogen atom in its ground state and how they differ from those of an excited state. We address the analogous questions for simple model that replaces the electron by a particle hopping (in discrete time) on a circular lattice. -
Boundaries and Defects in 4d N=4 SYM
Masahito Yamazaki University of Tokyo
We discuss boundary conditions and domain walls in 4d N=4 SYM, focusing on those preserving 4 supercharges. Along the way we revisit the old problem of the quantum-corrected moduli space of 3d N=2 theories.