Talks

A remarkable result from heavy ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is that shortly after a collision, the medium produced behaves as a nearly ideal liquid. The system is very dynamic and evolves from a state of two colliding nuclei to a liquid in a time roughly equivalent to the time it takes light to cross a proton. Understanding the mechanisms behind the rapid approach to a liquid state is a challenging task. In recent years holography has emerged as a powerful tool to study non-equilibrium phenomena, mapping the (challenging) dynamics of quantum systems onto the dynamics of classical gravitational systems. The creation of a liquid in a quantum theory maps onto the classical process of gravitational collapse and black hole formation. I will describe how one can use holography to study processes which mimic the dynamics of heavy ion collisions.

Isaac Newton is known today as one of the most profound scientists to have ever lived. Newton's discoveries in physics, optics, and mathematics overturned a variety of fundamental beliefs about nature and reshaped science in ways that are still powerfully with us. But this is only part of Newton's fascinating story. Research over the last generation has revealed that the famous scientist spent over thirty years composing, transcribing, and expounding alchemical texts, resulting in a mass of papers totaling about a million manuscript words. In fact, Newton seems to have considered himself one of an elite alchemical brotherhood, even going so far as to coin private anagrams of his name in the secretive custom of the sons of art. Despite our growing knowledge of Newton's deep involvement in alchemy, one basic question remains to be answered Why did the founder of Newtonian physics believe in alchemy, a discipline long viewed as discredited in the modern scientific world? William R. Newman's lecture will attempt to arrive at an answer to that question by providing the evidence that led seventeenth-century thinkers to an acceptance of alchemical transmutation.

Guided by idealized but soluble nonrenormalizable models, a nontraditional proposal for the quantization of covariant scalar field theories is advanced, which achieves a term-by-term, divergence-free perturbation analysis of interacting models expanded about a suitable pseudofree theory [differing from a free theory by an $O(\hbar^2)$ term]. This procedure not only provides acceptable solutions for models for which no acceptable solution currently exists, e.g., $\varphi^4_n$, for spacetime dimension $n\ge4$, but offers a new, divergence-free solution, for less-singular models as well, e.g., $\varphi^4_n$, for $n=2,3$.

"Conventional" superconductivity is one of the most dramatic phenomena in condensed matter physics, and yet by the 1970's it was fully understood - a solved problem much like quantum electrodynamics. The discovery of high temperature superconductivity changed all that and opened the door, not only to higher Tc's, but also to a wealth of even more exotic phenomena, including things like topologically ordered superconductors with factional vortices and non-Abelian statistics. I will describe some of the evolution of the field of exotic superconductivity, with a focus on recent theoretical and experimental work which sheds light on whether strontium ruthenate supports topological chiral superconductivity.

In this talk we quickly review the basics of the modal "toy model" of quantum theory described by Schumacher in his September 22 colloquium at PI. We then consider how the theory addresses more general open systems. Because the modal theory has a more primitive mathematical structure than actual quantum mechanics, it lacks density operators, positive operator measurements, and completely positive maps. As we will show, however, modal quantum theory has an elegant description of the states, effects and operations of open modal systems -- a description with close analogies to actual quantum mechanics.