Talks

Presented as part of the SciComm Collider 2 workshop.
All PI Residents are invited. 

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A colloquium featuring 2 perspectives on science communication.

Tatiana Erukhimova - Making Physics Fun and Approachable
Matthew Strassler - The Challenge of Communicating Physics Accessibly, Clearly and Accurately

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The correlation functions of large-scale fluctuations are crucial observables in modern cosmology. These boundary correlators contain rich information about the bulk dynamics and can be used to probe physics at the inflation scale. There have been considerable efforts in the analytical study of inflation correlators in recent years. In this talk, I will introduce the basic structure of inflation correlators and several analytical methods we have developed for their computation. In particular, I will introduce the method of partial Mellin-Barnes (PMB) representation. With this method, we can largely solve the massive tree correlators analytically. At the loop level, we use PMB to prove a factorization theorem for the nonanalytical part of inflation correlators, which produces a characteristic nonlocal signal. Finally, we can recover the full correlator starting from this nonanalytical part using a dispersion integral.

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I will review the "gyroscopic gravitational memory”, the permanent effect of gravitational waves on freely-falling gyroscopes far from the source of gravitational radiation. Then, I will compute the effect created by binary systems in the post-Newtonian approximation. The discussion naturally involves the helicity of gravitational waves and gravitational electric-magnetic duality.

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Presented as part of the SciComm Collider 2 workshop.
All PI Residents are invited. 

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While scientists and journalists have many overlapping interests and skills, they often differ in their goals, resources, and expertise. This talk covers strategies, tips, and approaches researchers can use to make their interactions with writers and journalists rewarding and enjoyable. It will also cover ideas about pitching and writing for popular science and mainstream media publications. This session will be as interactive as possible, so feel free to bring your questions, concerns, and ideas.

Speaker Bio:
Patchen Barss is a Toronto-based science journalist and author. He has designed and run many workshops and training sessions for scientists and other researchers engaging in media relations and public engagement.

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We will discuss work, joint with Victor Ginzburg, on the quantization (non-commutative deformation) of the Ngô morphism, a morphism of group schemes which plays a key role in Ngô’s proof of the fundamental lemma in the Langlands program. We will also discuss how the tools used to construct this morphism can be used to prove conjectures of Ben-Zvi—Gunningham, which predict that this morphism gives “spectral decomposition” of DG categories with an action of a reductive group over the coarse quotient of a maximal Cartan subalgebra by the affine Weyl group.

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For continuous-variable systems, the negativities in the s-parametrized family of quasi-probability representations on a classical phase space establish a sort of hierarchy of non-classility measures. The coherent states, by design, display no negativity for any value of -1≤s≤1, meaning that sampling from the quantum probability distribution resulting from any measurement of a coherent state can be classically simulated, placing the coherent states as the most classical states according to this particular choice of phase space.

In this talk, I will describe how to construct s-ordered quasi-probability representations for finite-dimensional quantum systems when the phase space is equipped with more general group symmetries, focusing on the fermionic SO(2n) symmetry. Along the way, I will comment on an obstruction to an analogue of Hudson's theorem, namely that the only pure states that have positive s=0 Wigner functions are Gaussian states, and a possible remedy by giving up linearity in the phase-space correspondence.

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The quantum difference equation (qde) is the $q$-difference equation which is proposed by Okounkov and Smirnov to encode the $K$-theoretic twisted quasimap counting for the Nakajima quiver varieties. In this talk, we will give a direct quantum toroidal algebra $U_{q,t}(\hat{\hat{\mf{sl}}}_{n})$ construction for the qde of the affine type $A$ quiver varieties. We will show that there is a really explicit and concise formula for the quantum difference operators. Moreover we will show that the degeneration limit of the quantum difference equation is equivalent to the Dubrovin connection for the quantum cohomology of the affine type A quiver varieties, which will give the description of the monodromy representation of the Dubrovin connection via the monodromy operators in the quantum difference equation.

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4 months after it opened, the Tacoma Narrows bridge, one of the world's
longest suspension bridges at the time, collapsed spectacularly in the first
storm that hit it. Though it was built to exceed all of the standrds at the
time, something  clearly went wrong. The failure was filmed from almost the
beginning to the end (about 1 hour), and that film has been shown to almost
all first year physics or engineering classes as an example of resonance, that
explanation is clearly nonsense. What happened? Why did it collapse. The
explanation is closely linked to, for example, the reason that clarinets or
flutes, or even violins, make their music. With Daniel Green (whom you may
remember from his time at Toronto) we were able to show in detail what
happened.