PODCAST · education
Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC)
by Michael Haack
The Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics organizes regular colloquia about topics of current interest in the field of theoretical physics.
Episodes
-
Chiral symmetry breaking, emergent Higgs mechanism, and critical matter
The upshot of extensive studies of �uctuations in condensed matter systems is that their qualitative importance is typically con#ned to isolated critical points of continuous transitions between phases of matter. This conventional wisdom also predicts the number of low energy Goldstone modes…
more -
Precision Measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background
We review the current status of measurements of the spectrum, an isotropy and polarization of the CMB, and their impact on cos- mology. We show that there is still a large discovery potential in these measurements, complementing and synergic to other cosmology observations. We also describe a...
-
The development of twistor geometry for the description of fundamental physics
I will review the basic defi�nitions and ideas of the twistor program for fundamental physics, as started by Roger Penrose around 1970. I will give particular attention to certain conformally invariant struc- tures involving deformed helicities, relevant to scattering amplitudes for massless…
more -
Topological Superconductivity and Unconventional pairing in Oxide Interfaces
To pinpoint the microscopic mechanism for superconductivity has proven to be one of the most outstanding challenges in the physics of correlated quantum matter. Thus far, the most direct evidence for an electronic pairing mechanism is the observation of a new symmetry of the order-parameter, as...
-
Higher Spin --- CFT duality
The conjectured relation between higher spin theories on anti de-Sitter (AdS) spaces and weakly coupled conformal �field theories is reviewed. I shall then outline the evidence in favour of a concrete duality of this kind, relating a speci�c higher spin theory on AdS3 to a family of 2d minimal...
-
Searching for New Forces Using Torsion Pendula
Equivalence principle violation, deviations from the inverse-square law of gravity, and long-range interactions between particle spins o�er powerful tests of beyond-the-standard-model physics. Using a torsion pendulum, a technique that dates to the 18th century, is still the most sensitive way to...
-
A Closer Look at Black Holes
Several new techniques are currently being employed to probe the strong gravitational fi�eld in the vicinity of black holes. Long baselineinterferometry at sub-millimeter wavelengths sets constraints on the silhouette of the black holes in the Galactic center (SgrA*) and M87. Stars which get...
-
Higher-Spin Gravity and Higher Spin Black Holes in Three Dimensions
Three-dimensional Einstein gravity has no local dynamical degree of freedom. Yet, it is far from being trivial when the cosmological constant is negative. (i) It admits black hole solutions. (ii) It easily allows for consistently interacting and tractable higher-spin extensions. (iii) It…
more -
Einstein and Quantum Mechanics: It's Not What You Think
Einstein is well known for his rejection of quantum mechanics in the form it emerged from the work of Heisenberg, Born and Schrodinger in 1926. Much less appreciated are the many seminal contributions he made to quantum theory prior to his �final scientifi�c verdict, that the theory was at best...
-
Statistical Physics and Information Theory : New Frontiers
Since the emergence of information theory in the middle of the 20th century, this new scientific field has been deeply entangled with statistical physics, as attested from the beginning by the use of entropy to quantify information content. The talk will explore the major impact of these...
-
Sommerfeld Lecture Series
In connection with the existing and forthcoming missions dedicated to search for cosmic antimatter, the models of baryogenesis leading to an efficient creation of astronomically large antimatter objects are reviewed. It is argued that such objects may be abundant in the universe and even in the...
-
Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
A theory with such a mathematical beauty cannot be wrong: this was one of the main arguments in favor of string theory, which unifies all known physical theories of fundamental interactions in a single coherent description of the universe. But no one has ever observed strings, not even…
more -
Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
Localization of the eigenfunctions of quantum particles in a random potential was discovered by P.W. Anderson more than 50 years ago. In spite of its respectable maturity and rather intensive theoretical and experimental studies this field is by far not exhausted. Anderson localization was...
-
Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
Evidence has been accumulating for several decades that many galaxies harbor central mass concentrations that may be in the form of black holes with masses between a few million to a few billion time the mass of the Sun. I will discuss measurements over the last two decades, employing adaptive...
-
Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
The Planck mission was launched successfully in May last year. I will give a summary of the scientific aims of the Planck mission and a brief overview of its current status. I will also place the Planck mission in context with ground and suborbital CMB experiments and other probes of early…
more -
Arnold Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
The next generation of surveys, e.g. the Dark Energy Survey, PanSTARRS, LSST, Euclid and others, aim to study the nature of Dark Energy and alternatives. The talk will discuss how the Dark Energy paradigm evolved over the past 20 years, and the cosmic probes which will help us to test it. In...
-
Arnold Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
The "Inverse Ising Problem" refers to finding the parameters (the Jij's and the hi's) in an Ising model given the first and second moments (the magnetizations mi and the correlation functions cij). This is of considerable interest in machine learning and data analysis whenever the data set and…
more -
Arnold Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
Based on a calculation of the shear viscosity η and the entropy density s of certain strongly coupled field theories via the AdS/CFT-correspondence, Kovtun, Son and Starinets conjectured that their ratio is bounded below by the universal number ħ/4πkB, a bound that appears to hold for all…
more -
Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
Are there plausible extensions of the Standard Model that could lead to early discoveries at the LHC? To address this general question on a concrete example, I will consider a class of minimal models with an extra massive neutral gauge boson Z'. I will first review different theoretical…
more -
Arnold Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
In this talk I present a simple derivation of an old result of Kochen and Specker, which is apparently unrelated to the famous work of Bell on hidden variables, but is presumably equally important. Kochen and Specker showed in 1967 that quantum mechanics cannot be embedded into a classical...
-
Arnold Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
In this talk I will describe the light-front formulation of maxi- mally supersymmetric theories. This is a formalism where only the physical degrees of freedom is used. This means that the SuperPoincaré invariance is non-linearly realized, a fact we use to build the models. In this formalism the...
-
Arnold Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
To illuminate how electroweak symmetry breaking shapes the physical world, we investigate what the world would be like in the absence of electroweak symmetry breaking at the usual scale, whether by the conventional Higgs mechanism or by any of its alternatives, including dynamical symmetry…
more -
Arnold Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium
Majorana fermions are spatially localized superpositions of electron and hole excitations in the middle of a superconducting energy gap. These unusual particles have been predicted to occur at the interface between a magnetic and superconducting electrode, in contact with a topological insulator...
-
Quantum Cryptography and Computational Thinking
One of the great insights of cryptography and computational complexity is the notion of computationally-bounded algorithms, which allow us to reason about properties that would otherwise be impossible to achieve. Could these ideas also be relevant to quantum information and quantum mechanics? In...
-
Decoding Primordial Fluctuations
All the information we will ever obtain from the early universe is imprinted in the spatial correlations of primordial fluctuations at the hot Big Bang. I will explain how an influx of ideas from various areas of fundamental physics is providing us with new conceptual and practical tools to…
more -
High-precision gravitational wave physics from worldline quantum field theory
The gravitational two-body problem has been fundamental to physics since Newton's time. With the advent of gravitational wave astronomy and the anticipated third generation of gravitational wave detectors in the 2030s, there is an increasing need for high-precision predictions from Einstein's...
-
The Denario Project: Deep knowledge AI agents for scientific discovery
We present Denario, an AI multi-agent system designed to be a scientific research assistant. Denario can perform many different tasks, such as generating ideas, checking the literature, developing research plans, writing and executing code, making plots, and writing a scientific paper. Denario is...
-
Structured Vacuum Fluctuations: A New Pathway to Quantum Materials Design within QEDFT
An appealing and challenging route towards engineering materials with specic properties is to find ways of designing or selectively manipulate materials, especially at the quantum level. We will provide an overview of how well-established concepts in the fields of quantum chemistry and materials...
-
Tensor Networks and Quantum Computers
Tensor Network States, like matrix product or projected entangled pair states play an important role in both, quantum information theory and many-body physics. They offer a compact and efficient representation, enabling accelerated numerical computations and providing intuitive insights into...
-
Chemomechanical self-organization across scales in living systems
A hallmark of living systems is their ability to generate and maintain order under constant fluctuations. In cells, such order often emerges from chemomechanical pattern formation, where proteins both sense and remodel the geometry of the cell. Here, I will discuss how theoretical modeling and...
-
The search for the fundamental scale of gravity
Already within the Standard Model, we expect that the fundamental scale of gravity, the scale where gravity becomes strong, is slightly lower than the Planck scale. Theories with extra dimensions or with many additional particle species enhance this effect and are motivated by giving a unified...
-
Cosmological singularities, quantum chaos and prime numbers
At a singularity the continuum description of spacetime breaks down and one can hope that the microscopic constituents will be revealed. Over 50 years ago, Belinski-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz (BKL) argued that the dynamics of spacetime close to the Big Bang singularity (or inside black holes) is…
more -
Active feedback and functionality in model tissues
In the development of animals, tissues self-organise starting from a single cell into lay- ers, shapes and patterns. This active mechanical process operates beyond the theoretical framework of reaction-diffusion equations such as Turing patterns. At the same time, combining active driving with...
-
Mystery of highest energy particles in the Universe
Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs) are particles with energies up to $3\times 10^20 eV$, originating from unknown sources and producing extensive air showers in Earth's atmosphere. In this talk, I will review the current status of UHECR observations, including the energy spectrum, mass...
-
Ecology and Perpetual Evolution in High Dimensions
In a simple, constant environment does evolution continue forever? Does extensive diversification via small genetic and ecological differences? What are general evolutionary consequences of organismic complexity? Hints from long term laboratory evolution experiments and findings from genomic data...
-
Activating quantum matter
In driven open quantum matter, coherent many-body quantum dynamics, drive, and dissipation play equally significant roles. These systems span a wide range of examples, including cold atomic gases, exciton-polaritons in solid state, and quantum devices designed for quantum information…
more -
Primordial Black Holes After 50 Years: The Bright Side
This talk will overview the history of primordial black hole (PBH) research from the first papers around 50 years ago to the present time. I will first discuss their possible formation mechanisms, including critical collapse from inflationary fluctuations and various types of phase transition. I...
-
Moire Systems as Quantum Simulators of Many Strongly Correlated System
We will review the beginning of experimental and theoretical studies of moire systems and their evolution up to present. We will show how thousands of p orbitals in a moire unit cell of graphene can create single Heavy fermion at moire scale, and how the interaction between such fermions can lead...
-
What String Theory Teaches Us About Scattering amplitudes
In this talk, I will explore the fascinating connections between string theory and quantum field theory, focusing on what we have learned from studying string scattering amplitudes. These insights have not only deepened our understanding of particle interactions but have also led to significant...
-
Microscopic Bounds on Macroscopic Theories
I will discuss Effective Field Theories that can originate from microscopic unitary theories, and their relation to moment theory. I will show that massive gravity, theories with isolated massive higher-spin particles, and theories with very irrelevant interactions, don't posses healthy UV...
-
Gravity as a Quantum Computer
Our search for a quantum theory of gravity is aided by a unique and perplexing feature of the classical theory: General Relativity already knows" about its own quantum states (the entropy of a black hole), and about those of all matter (via the covariant entropy bound). The results we are able to...
-
From Quantum Scattering Amplitudes to Gravitational Wave Observables
Gravitational waves open a new window into our universe. In this colloquium we discuss particle theorists' perspective on calculations directly relevant for gravitational-wave emission from compact objects, which is rooted in quantum field theory and builds on the idea that gravitational...
-
Dark bubbles and black shells - the darkest corners of the universe in a new light
Understanding dark energy and black holes remain a great challenge to fundamental physics. In this talk I will review the difficulties and explore some new and speculative approaches.
-
Thinking positively: the numerical quantum mechanical bootstrap
I will describe recent developments on the (numerical) computation of energy levels of various systems by the quantum mechanical bootstrap. The main way the bootstrap works is by using constraints that arise from positive matrices. Part of the goal is to turn the bootstrap problem into a problem...
-
The erasure of topological defects and the saturation phenomenon
Interesting erasure phenomena arise from interactions between lower-dimensional and higher-dimensional objects and impact cosmology and fundamental physics. In the first part of the colloquium, I will examine the case for topological defects, revealing insights into the interactions of magnetic...
-
Can we tame the electronic Schrödinger equation?
One of the major problems of computational chemistry is the ab initio prediction of energies and properties of molecules. The electronic Schrödinger equations provides the in-principle solution, but because of intrinsic difficulties associated with the singular and long-ranged Coulomb…
more -
The massless limit of massive gauge fields
One of the simplest ways to make gauge fields massive is to add them a mass "by hand". Intuitively, one could expect that the corresponding massless theory would then be easy to recover. Yet, conventional methods indicate that such a limit is singular. In this talk, we will explore the massless...
-
Applications of Machine Learning and Neural Networks to Quantum Systems
Learning algorithms using deep neural networks are currently having a major impact on basic sciences. The physics of complex quantum systems is no exception, with multiple applications that constitute a new field of research. Examples include the representation and optimization of wave functions…
more -
Loop Blow-up Inflation
I will discuss recent progress in the study of cosmological applications of string compactifications with stabilised moduli, focusing in particular on inflation, reheating and dark energy.
-
Advances and Challenges in Solving the Two-Body Problem in General Relativity
Since the discovery of the first binary black-hole merger in 2015, analytical and numerical solutions to the relativistic two-body problem have been essential for the detection and interpretation of more than 100 gravitational-wave signals from compact-object binaries. Future experiments will...
We're indexing this podcast's transcripts for the first time — this can take a minute or two. We'll show results as soon as they're ready.
No matches for "" in this podcast's transcripts.
No topics indexed yet for this podcast.
Loading reviews...
ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics organizes regular colloquia about topics of current interest in the field of theoretical physics.
HOSTED BY
Michael Haack
CATEGORIES
Loading similar podcasts...
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC) have?
Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC) currently has 146 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC) about?
The Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics organizes regular colloquia about topics of current interest in the field of theoretical physics.
How often does Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC) release new episodes?
Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC) publishes regularly with 146 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC)?
You can listen to Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC) on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC)?
Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC) is created and hosted by Michael Haack.
URL copied to clipboard!