Scientific Series

During this colloquium, I will discuss my journey in looking for astronomical information hiding in the ancestral knowledge of my community. I will show concrete examples of my findings and encourage communities to engage in similar practice to provide content that could be used to teach indigenous Astronomy in classrooms. 

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Bio:

Laurie Rousseau-Nepton is a new faculty at the University of Toronto and the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics. She comes with six years of experience working as a resident astronomer at the Canada-France-Hawaii Observatory supporting various instruments including wide-field cameras, high-resolution spectrographs, Fourier Transform Spectro-imager. She received her diploma from Université Laval by studying regions of star formation in spiral galaxies and helping with the development of two Fourier Transform Spectro-imagers, SpIOMM and SITELLE. She is now leading an international project called SIGNALS, the Star formation,Ionized Gas, and Nebular Abundances Legacy Survey, which sampled with the SITELLE instrument more than 50,000 of star-forming regions in 40 nearby galaxies to understand how the local environment affect the young star clusters characteristics.

This seminar will be divided in two segments: 1) New Instrumentation for Astronomy and 2) the SIGNAL-Survey of Star-forming regions in Nearby Galaxy.

1) Evolution of technologies and optics manufacturing technics are providing new interesting options for the design of astronomical instruments to increase precision and add new capabilities. In this presentation, I will discuss my new laboratory plan at the University of Toronto to include Micro-kinetic inductance detector arrays and meta-surface optics to a Fourier Transform Imaging spectrograph design. The goal is to reach high-spectral resolution (R:15,000 to 80,000) over a large field-of-view, while keeping high sensitivity.

2) SIGNALS stands for the Star formation, Ionized Gas, and Nebular Abundances Legacy Survey. Using a Fourier Transform Imaging Spectrograph SITELLE, at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, we observed 40 nearby galaxies and covered over 50,000 star-forming regions in different environment at a spatial resolution from 0.5 to 40 pc. Covering several emission line spectral features including Halpha (at R: 5,000), the survey aims at characterizing the star-forming sites and their environments to produce the most complete and well resolved database on star formation.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94273599584?pwd=TUY3UFpVa20wbkJUcEdoTmlYUzlQUT09

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Bio:

Laurie Rousseau-Nepton is a new faculty at the University of Toronto and the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics. She comes with six years of experience working as a resident astronomer at the Canada-France-Hawaii Observatory supporting various instruments including wide-field cameras, high-resolution spectrographs, Fourier Transform Spectro-imager. She received her diploma from Université Laval by studying regions of star formation in spiral galaxies and helping with the development of two Fourier Transform Spectro-imagers, SpIOMM and SITELLE. She is now leading an international project called SIGNALS, the Star formation, Ionized Gas, and Nebular Abundances Legacy Survey, which sampled with the SITELLE instrument more than 50,000 of star-forming regions in 40 nearby galaxies to understand how the local environment affect the young star clusters characteristics. 

I will review how protected correlation functions in certain SQFTs can be used to ``quantize'' phase spaces built from their spaces of vacua.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96543843231?pwd=U0d5d3EvVXJGT0VzR2JYUzBQVGJlUT09

The presence of many competing classical ground states in frustrated magnets implies that quantum fluctuations may stabilize quantum spin liquids (QSL), which are characterized by fractionalized excitations and emergent gauge fields. A paradigmatic example is the U(1) Dirac spin liquid (DSL), which at low-energies is described by emergent quantum electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions (QED3), a strongly interacting field theory with conformal symmetry. While the DSL is believed to be intrinsically stable, its robustness against various other couplings has been largely unexplored and is a timely question, also given recent experiments on triangular-lattice rare-earth oxides. In this talk, using complementary perturbation theory and scaling arguments as well as results from numerical DMRG simulations, I will show that a symmetry-allowed coupling between (classical) finite-wavevector lattice distortions and monopole operators of the U(1) Dirac spin liquid generally induces a spin-Peierls instability towards a (confining) valence-bond solid state. Away from the limit of static distortions, I will argue that the phonon energy gap establishes a parameter regime where the spin liquid is expected to be stable.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96764903405?pwd=Y0gyU3hGSC9va0hzWnZRZFBOVmRCZz09

With rapid progress in simulation of strongly interacting quantum Hamiltonians, the challenge in characterizing unknown phases becomes a bottleneck for scientific progress. We demonstrate that a Quantum-Classical hybrid approach (QuCl) of mining the projective snapshots with interpretable classical machine learning, can unveil new signatures of seemingly featureless quantum states. The Kitaev-Heisenberg model on a honeycomb lattice with bond-dependent frustrated interactions presents an ideal system to test QuCl. The model hosts a wealth of quantum spin liquid states: gapped and gapless Z2 spin liquids, and a chiral spin liquid (CSL) phase in a small external magnetic field. Recently, various simulations have found a new intermediate gapless phase (IGP), sandwiched between the CSL and a partially polarized phase, launching a debate over its elusive nature. We reveal signatures of phases in the model by contrasting two phases pairwise using an interpretable neural network, the correlator convolutional neural network (CCNN). We train the CCNN with a labeled collection of sampled projective measurements and reveal signatures of each phase through regularization path analysis. We show that QuCl reproduces known features of established spin liquid phases and ordered phases. Most significantly, we identify a signature motif of the field-induced IGP in the spin channel perpendicular to the field direction, which we interpret as a signature of Friedel oscillations of gapless spinons forming a Fermi surface. Our predictions can guide future experimental searches for U(1) spin liquids.

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Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94233944575?pwd=OVljLzMrZzlKeUErNHZQRkEzMFRKUT09

A tower is an infinite sequence of deloopings of symmetric monoidal ever-higher categories. Towers are places where extended functorial field theories take values. Towers are a "deeper" version of commutative rings (as opposed to "higher rings" aka E∞-spectra). Notably, towers have their own opinions about Galois theory, and think that usual Galois groups are merely shallow approximations of deeper homotopical objects. In this talk, I will describe some steps in the construction and calculation of the deeper Galois group of a characteristic-zero field. In particular, I'll explain a homotopical version of the Kummer description of abelian extensions. This is joint work in progress with David Reutter.

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Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/97950701035?pwd=Wk9FRSt2MkN3eWptTVltRVJncnFHdz09

The event horizon of a dynamical black hole is generically a non-smooth hypersurface. I shall describe the types of non-smooth structure that can arise on a horizon that is smooth at late time. This includes creases, corners and caustic points. I shall discuss ``perestroikas'' of these structures, in which they undergo a qualitative change at an instant of time. A crease perestroika gives an exact local description of the event horizon near the ``instant of merger'' of a generic black hole merger. Other crease perestroikas describe horizon nucleation or collapse of a hole in a toroidal horizon. I shall discuss the possibility that creases contribute to black hole entropy, and the implications of non-smoothness for higher derivative terms in black hole entropy. This talk is based on joint work with Maxime Gadioux.

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Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98839294408?pwd=cytNYThQaDV4Y2lob1REY0NyaTJNUT09

A stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) originates from numerous faint gravitational wave (GW) signals arising from coalescing compact binary objects. Based on the current estimated merger rate, the SGWB signal is expected to originate from non-overlapping GW waveforms where the chirping nature of individual events is expected to be preserved. In this talk, we present a novel technique, Spectrogram Correlated Stacking (or SpeCs), which goes beyond the usual cross-correlation (and to higher frequencies) by exploiting the higher-order statistics in the time-frequency domain. This method would account for the chirping nature of the individual events that comprise SGWB and enable us to extract more information from the signal due to its intrinsic non-gaussianity. We show that SpeCs improve the signal-to-noise for the detection of SGWB by a factor close to 8, compared to standard optimal cross-correlation methods which are tuned to measure only the power spectrum of the signal. SpeCs can probe beyond the power spectrum and its application to the GW data available from the current and next-generation detectors would speed up the SGWB discovery.

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Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91002244803?pwd=a0dnMjZEYTEwSHBCVGRSeHB2Y2pJdz09

An ongoing program of work in statistical physics and quantum dynamics is concerned with understanding the character of systems which follow an unconventional approach towards thermal equilibrium. In this talk, I will add to this story by introducing examples of simple 1D systems---both classical and quantum---which thermalize in very unusual ways. These examples have dynamics which is strictly local and translation-invariant, but in spite of this, they: a) can have very long thermalization times, with expectation values of local operators relaxing only over times exponential in the system size; and b) can thermalize only when they are placed in extremely large baths, with the required bath size growing exponentially (or even faster) in system size. Proofs of these results will be given using techniques from geometric group theory, a beautiful area of mathematics concerned with the complexity and geometry of infinite discrete groups. This talk will be based on a paper in preparation with Shankar Balasubramanian, Sarang Golaparakrishnan, and Alexey Khudorozhkov.

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Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99430001465?pwd=NENlS1M5UGc5UWM1ekQvRWFrZGYyUT09

In 2013, Cachazo, He and Yuan discovered a remarkable framework for scattering amplitudes in Quantum Field Theory (QFT) which mixes the real, complex and tropical geometry associated to the moduli space of n points on the projective line, $M_{0,n}$. By duality, this moduli space has a twin moduli space of $n$ generic points in $P^{n-3}$, leading to dual realization of scattering amplitudes, using a generalization of the CHY formalism introduced in 2019 by Cachazo, Early, Guevara and Mizera (CEGM). Any duality begs for an explanation! And, what physical phenomena lie between the twin moduli spaces? CEGM developed a framework to answer the question for moduli spaces of $n$ points in any $P^{k-1}$, leading to the discovery of rich, recursive structures and novel behaviors which portend an extension of QFT. We discuss recent joint works with Cachazo and Zhang, and with Geiger, Panizzut, Sturmfels, Yun, in which we dig deeper into some of the many mysteries which arise.

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Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95706337178?pwd=cnBka3lFWDBoRlFZV1VadXdGZ1JnZz09

Quantum Hall phases are the most exotic experimentally established quantum phases of matter.Recently they have been discovered at zero external magnetic field in two dimensional moire materials. I will describe recent work (with Xue-Yang Song and Ya-Hui Zhang) on their proximate phases and associated phase transitions that is motivated by the high tunability of thede moire systems. These phase transitions (and some of the proximate phases) are exotic as well, and realize novel ‘beyond Landau’ criticality that have been explored theoretically for many years. I will show that these moiré platforms provide a great experimental opportunity to study these unconventional phase transitions and related unconventional phases, thereby opening a new direction for research in quantum matter.

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Zoom link : https://pitp.zoom.us/j/97483204701?pwd=S2x4ck9tNHFjM0RiTDNWNFhaMk9SUT09

 I will present a galaxy formation model within the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) framework that is calibrated on the results of galaxy formation simulations and some of the empirical properties of nearby dwarf galaxies. I will then use the model to interpret a number of ostensible challenges to the LCDM framework, such as the "too-big-too-fail problem", "central density problem" and the "planes of satellites" problem and will argue that none of these pose a serious challenge to LCDM, as the corresponding observations can be largely understood within the current galaxy formation modeling. I will also show that the same galaxy formation model can explain the abundance of UV-bright galaxies at z>5 measured by the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope recently, if the expected increase of burstiness of star formation in galaxies towards early epochs is taken into account.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91798519705?pwd=Nk9rM0tFSXcrWDhLdXFhVmJWbGgvUT09