Colloquia Archive 2014

The ideas of quantum criticality have proven a powerful unifying framework for a broad range of strongly correlated quantum systems. Experimental probes with ever greater sensitivity have resolved subtle new states of electronic matter in the vicinity of quantum critical points. Attempts to understand these have led to a remarkable ...

Helioseismology techniques have revealed the details of the Sun's internal rotation with remarkable precision. The radiative zone is nearly uniformly rotating, whereas the convective zone differential rotation is generally constant on cones, dominated by its latitudinal (not cylindrical) gradient. In this talk, I will show how standard dynamics augmented ...

An approach to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is developed which makes the Heisenberg cut between the deterministic microscopic quantum world and the stochastic macroscopic world explicit. The stochastic nature of quantum mechanics arises when the system is probed by a set of coarse-grained macroscopic observables whose resolution scale ...

The discovery of an apparently elementary Standard-Model-like Higgs boson strengthens the deep mystery surrounding physics at the TeV energy scale. Almost all theories of the origin of the Higgs and the associated scale of electroweak symmetry breaking either have dynamically unnatural parameters, or severely lack explanatory power for most features ...

After a pedagogical introduction to the rheology (deformation and flow properties) of complex fluids and soft materials, we discuss recent research concerning viscoelastic instabilities in these materials, where an initially homogeneous flow field gives way to a spatially more complicated one. We focus particularly on extensional flow protocols and present ...

We will show a documentary featuring an interview with Roy Glauber. Nobel laureate Prof. Roy J. Glauber is the last living scientist from the Theory Division of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. His clear, fluent and articulate narration brings first hand information on the life at Los Alamos, the ...

I will explain how galaxies and their clusters could originate from the initial quantum fluctuations and then discuss the recent CMB experiments which confirmed the predictions of the quantum theory of cosmological perturbations.

Knots are part of our everyday life. In some cases they can be very useful as in climbing or sailing whereas in some others they can be a nuisance, as we experience each time we try to disentangle extension cables or garden pipes. Like extension cables, long biological filaments such ...

Wojtak, Hansen and Hjorth (Nature, 2011) have measured the long- predicted gravitational redshifts in galaxy clusters using Sloan Digital Sky Survey data. The effect is very small, corresponding to a velocity shift of only ~10 km/s in clusters with internal random motions ~600 km/s, but is in good ...

The field of complex networks has been flourishing in the last fifteen years and has shed light on the underlying structure of complex systems as different as the Internet, or the protein interaction in the cell. This extensive body of work has defined a new paradigm for looking at interacting ...

The origin of the galaxies represents an important focus of current cosmological research, both observational and theoretical. Its resolution involves a comprehensive understanding of star formation, galaxy dynamics, supermassive black holes, and the cosmology of the very early universe. It is a field that is largely driven by a phenomenology ...

An international team has recently completed the Technical Design Report for the International Linear Collider (ILC). The ILC is an electron-positron collider with a design target centre-of-mass energy of 500 GeV. Following the Higgs boson discovery it has been proposed to realise the ILC by building a 250 GeV 'Higgs ...

The Galactic center is one of the most fascinating and extreme places in the Galaxy. Harboring a supermassive black hole with a mass of order 4 million solar masses it experiences cycles of activity and star formation, separated by periods of quiescence that last of order a million years. The ...

I will discuss an investigation into the stochastic dynamics of entities which are confined to a set of islands, between which they migrate. They are assumed to be one of two types, and in addition to migration, they also reproduce and die. Systems which fall into this class are common ...

The BICEP2 collaboration recently announced detection of polarization patterns in the cosmic microwave background characteristic of primordial gravitational waves. This talk will describe the context and main results from BICEP2 and outline their significance in supporting and constraining cosmological models, particularly the inflationary cosmology.

The concepts of 'spontaneous symmetry breaking', 'generalized rigidity', and 'collective modes' play an important role in theoretical physics. Indeed much of the phenomenology of condensed matter can be understood in terms of these concepts within the framework of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. The story I tell is a synthesis ...

In the first part of this colloquium, I will assume that you've all seen quite a few talks on the recent Planck results, and so concentrate on some of the less well-known results. In particular, I will concentrate on what Planck can say about the very large-scale structure of ...

Entanglement is arguably the essence of Quantum Mechanics. It characterizes quantum correlation in states of condensed matter and quantum field theories. It provides the resources for quantum communication in the form of teleportation and cryptography. It establishes the obstruction to classicaly simulate quantum systems in an efficient way. It may ...

The analysis of rare decays of heavy flavour mesons has the potential to cast light on some of the big unknowns about the Universe such as: which underlying theory is the Standard Model embedded in, what is the nature of dark matter, and what is the process that created the ...

About the Lecture This is a talk about the smallest units of matter. The atomic hypothesis - that all matter is made of indecomposable particles - has dominated thinking about matter and energy in modern physics, culminating in today's Standard Model of particle physics. This model is one of the triumphs ...