Talks

Ecology is a very fragmented field with a variety of scientific questions and cultures. Toward the end of the school, I will present a personal perspective on what red threads run through the whole field and when the connection can benefit or not from being made in a mathematical language.

1. Phenomenology of community variability (intro, SAD)
2. Phenomenology in microbial communities (minimal patterns)
3. demographic stochasicity and migrations (birth-death-migration)
4. flavours of neutral theory (assumption, predictions)
5. continuous limit of birth-death-migration process (stationary and dynamic solution)
6. when NT works and fails

The gauge/gravity duality maps strongly correlated quantum condensed matter systems onto holographic models of gravity and provides a non-perturbative approach towards predicting its transport properties. In graphene, when the electron-electron scattering becomes more frequent than the scattering of electrons by phonons or disorder, the electrons gas behaves as a hydrodynamic fluid and expected to exhibit emergent universalities in dc charge and heat transport close to the charge neutrality where graphene becomes quantum critical. In this talk, I shall present some new experimental result on the electrical and thermal transport measurements in extremely high-quality graphene devices. I shall give evidence of the universal dc transport, breakdown of the Widemann-Franz law, and approach to the holographic limit of minimally dissipative flow of charge. We believe these experiments will lead to a new strategy to exploit high-quality graphene as a testing bed for some of the unifying concepts in physics.

While the formulation of quantum mechanics predates computability theory, the idea of computers based on quantum physics only arose much later, in the 1980s. Initially studied only by the curious and intrepid, quantum computation, and quantum information processing in general, came into the limelight in the 1990s. The impetus, namely, the discovery of rigorous evidence of the advantage offered by quantum computers, culminating in the Shor algorithm for Integer Factorization, is now well-known. Since then, the field has been guided by the promise of new technology while also allowing for the pursuit of ideas unfettered by practical (or even physical) considerations. I will describe some of the advances in the field in the wake of these developments.

Another important interdisciplinary approach in ecology is the search for large-scale or even "universal" empirical patterns with simple explanations, such as distribution of energy and biomass across the world and across various types of organisms (plants, herbivores, carnivores...). This lecture will present some insights and limits of simple deterministic patterns constrained by biological mechanisms.