Talks

The discovery of integrability in the large N limit of the prototypical realization of the AdS/CFT correspondence has raised the hope that the spectrum of scale dimensions in N=4 SYM (and strings in AdS_5 x S^5) might be known exactly, i.e. to all orders in the coupling constant. So far, most of the efforts focused on closed strings and periodic boundary conditions. In this talk I will discuss how these ideas are extended to open string and open boundary conditions. In particular how to obtain exact expressions for the boundary scattering matrices, discuss the integrability of the boundary conditions and how finite size effects may be taken into account.

I\'ll discuss three promising upcoming experimental measurements that will probe the expansion history of the universe: (1) growth bases tests of Dark Energy with the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect, including new results from the South Pole Telescope and APEX-SZ, (2) inflationary constraints that will be provided by the next generation of CMB-polarization experiments, with prospects from EBEX, and (3) standard ruler measurements from Baryon Acoustic oscillations, including an introduction to an ambitious new Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping initiative called CHIME. The talk will build on the PI-presentation last week from SPT-collaborator Jeff McMahon. I\'ll focus on the experimental aspects of each measurement, it\'s interface to theory, and spend most of the time on (3) CHIME.

A modified version of the double potential formalism for the electrodynamics of dyons is constructed. Besides the two vector potentials, this manifestly duality invariant formulation involves four additional potentials, scalar potentials which appear as Lagrange multipliers for the electric and magnetic Gauss constraints and potentials for the longitudinal electric and magnetic fields. In this framework, a static dyon appears as a Coulomb-like solution without string singularities. Dirac strings are needed only for the Lorentz force law, not for Maxwell\'s equations. The magnetic charge no longer appears as a topological conservation law but as a surface integral on a par with electric charge. The theory is generalized to curved space. As in flat space, the string singularities of dyonic black holes are resolved. As a consequence all singularities are protected by the horizon and the thermodynamics is shown to follow from standard arguments in the grand canonical ensemble.

This course is aimed at advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, and is inspired by a book by the same title, written by Padmanabhan. Each session consists of solving one or two pre-determined problems, which is done by a randomly picked student. While the problems introduce various subjects in Astrophysics and Cosmology, they do not serve as replacement for standard courses in these subjects, and are rather aimed at educating students with hands-on analytic/numerical skills to attack new problems.

This course is aimed at advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, and is inspired by a book by the same title, written by Padmanabhan. Each session consists of solving one or two pre-determined problems, which is done by a randomly picked student. While the problems introduce various subjects in Astrophysics and Cosmology, they do not serve as replacement for standard courses in these subjects, and are rather aimed at educating students with hands-on analytic/numerical skills to attack new problems.

The rise of quantum information science has been paralleled by the development of a vigorous research program aimed at obtaining an informational characterization or reconstruction of the quantum formalism, in a broad framework for stochastic theories that encompasses quantum and classical theory, but also a wide variety of other theories that can serve as foils to them. Such a reconstruction, at its most ambitious, is envisioned as playing a role in quantum physics similar to Einstein\'s reconstruction of the dynamics and kinetics of macroscopic bodies, and later of their gravitational interactions, on the basis of simple principles with clear operational meanings and experimental consequences. But short of such an ambitious goal, it could still lead to a principled understanding of the features of quantum mechanics that account for its greater-than-classical information-processing power, an understanding which could help guide the search for new quantum algorithms and protocols. I will summarize a convex operational framework for possible physical theories, and present results from a project to characterize quantum mechanics in terms of principles tightly linked to the possibility or impossibility of various information processing protocols. Previous results identified properties, like the existence of information-disturbance tradeoffs and restrictions on cloning and broadcasting, common to all nonclassical theories. In this talk I will focus on recent results involving protocols that are less generic. These are: the existence of exponentially secure bit commitment in non-classical theories without entanglement, the consequences for theories of the existence of a conclusive teleportation scheme, and sufficient conditions for the existence of a deterministic teleportation scheme. I\'ll also discuss sufficient conditions for \'remote steering\' of ensembles using entanglement, rendering insecure bit commitment protocols of the form shown to be secure in the unentangled case. Connections to the category-theoretic approach of Coecke and Abramsky, Selinger, Baez, and collaborators may be touched on if time permits. Joint work with various groups of collaborators including Jonathan Barrett, Matthew Leifer, Alexander Wilce, Oscar Dahlsten, and Ben Toner.

Theoretical neuroscience, like theoretical physics, attempts to discover and quantify the basic principles governing the systems it studies. Currently, however, there are very few attempts at unification across the levels of organization found in the brain. In this talk, I will describe the biological mechanisms of interest to neuroscientists, and describe a quantitative method for constructing sophisticated models of these mechanisms. Through a series of examples, I will show how the three principles that make up this method are general, allowing us to better understand a broad range of complex behaviour in a unified manner.

WMAP measurements of CMB temperature anisotropies reveal a power asymmetry: the average amplitude of temperature fluctuations in one hemisphere is larger than the average amplitude in the opposite hemisphere at the 99% confidence level. This power asymmetry may be generated during inflation by a large-amplitude superhorizon perturbation that causes the mean energy density to vary across the observable Universe. Such a superhorizon perturbation would also induce large-scale temperature anisotropies in the CMB; measurements of the CMB quadrupole and octupole (but not the dipole!) therefore constrain the perturbation\'s amplitude and wavelength. I will show how a superhorizon perturbation in a multi-field inflationary theory, the curvaton model, can produce the observed power asymmetry without generating unacceptable temperature fluctuations in the CMB. I will also discuss how this mechanism for generating the power asymmetry will be tested by forthcoming CMB experiments.

We review basic properties of effective worldvolume theory describing the dynamics of Dirichlet branes in type II supergravity backgrounds and then show that the SL(2,R) symmetry of IIB supergravity allows for the existence of new supersymmetric 7-brane configurations called Q7-branes. The Q7-branes differ from the D7-branes, in particular, by their coupling to the dilaton, axion and to `magnetic\' gauge field duals thereof. The appearance of Q7-branes and their instanton duals may indicate the existence of a new, yet unexplored, perturbative vacuum of type IIB string theory.

The general boundary state formulation is a key tool for extracting the semiclassical limit of nonpertubative theories of quantum gravity. In this talk I will discuss how this formalism works in the context of four-dimensional quantum Regge calculus with a general triangulation. A Gaussian boundary state selects a classical internal solution and peaks the path integral on it. As a result boundary observables, in particular the two-point function, can be computed order by order in a semiclassical asymptotic expansion. When the same methods are applied to a modified Regge theory that substitutes the exponential of the action by its cosine at each simplex in the triangulation, as conjectured from the semiclassical limit of spin foam models, the contributions from the sign-reversed terms are suppressed and the results match those of conventional Regge calculus. This talk is based on the results published in arXiv:0808.1107 [gr-qc].