# Colloquia Archive 2015

Dec142015

### At the frontier of Particle Physics—Nigel GLOVER

I discuss the current status of particle physics, and aim to answer questions such as Where are we now? What is special about the Higgs boson? What questions remain to ...

Dec112015

### How predictable is evolution?—Joachim KRUG

The relative importance of determinism and contingency in biological evolution is the subject of a long-standing debate. In the words of Stephen J. Gould, if we could replay the tape ...

Dec042015

### Making Living Matter from the bottom up —Ramin GOLESTANIAN

There are many ways to study life, and one that is particularly appealing to physicists is regarding it as self-organised active soft matter that is away from equilibrium just the ...

Nov202015

### Gas flow and the structure of the Galactic bar—James BINNEY

The evidence that our galaxy is a barred galaxy will be summarised. The bar's impact on local kinematics and on the flow of the ISM are significant lines of ...

Nov132015

### Modelling the most catastrophic astrophysical events in the universe—Luciano REZZOLLA

The Detection of gravitational waves is eagely expected as one of the most important scientific discoveries of the next decade. A worldwide effort is now working actively to pursue this ...

Nov062015

### Pushing the precision frontier in Collider Physics—Gudrun HEINRICH

I will review how the interplay between theory and experiment has written a success story in particle physics over the last decades. Then I will discuss recent developments which have ...

Oct302015

### Galaxy Formation at its Peak—Avishai DEKEL

The way galaxies form and evolve is a major open question in cosmology. Rapid progress is made based on observations and simulations of galaxies during the peak of their assembly ...

Oct092015

### The topological glass—Matthew TURNER

Ring polymers represent one of the last major theoretical challenges facing polymer physics. The essential difficulty lies in the non- local nature of the topological constraint associated with polymers of ...

Oct022015

### Quantum Black Holes: dissolving confusions and resolving paradoxes—Ramy BRUSTEIN

Hawking has discovered more than 40 years ago that black holes (BH's) evaporate. Ever since, ideas about how they evaporate have been a source of constant interest and controversy ...

Sep252015

### The Higgs boson as Inflaton—Fred JEGERLEHNER

The Higgs boson mass miraculously turns out to have a value which has been expected form vacuum stability up to the Planck scale. This opens the possibility that the Higgs ...

Sep162015

### Spatiotemporal dynamics at the transition to turbulence—Bruno ECKHARDT

When Osborne Reynolds documented his observations on the transition to turbulence in pressure driven pipe flow in 1883, he noticed that the turbulence remained localized to regions that extended over ...

Sep112015

### Entanglement Matters: from Bell states to Quantum Tensor Networks—Frank VERSTRAETE

The theory of quantum entanglement is revolutionizing the field of quantum many body physics. One of the most relevant developments in this direction has been the introduction of quantum tensor ...

Sep042015

### Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, I gotta do Feynmann graphs 'til I die: A continuum theory of flocking—John TONER

Flocking - the collective motion of large numbers of organisms or other self- propelled entities - exhibits a number of strange and baffling phenomena. The most baffling is that it exists at ...

Jun262015

### Big Bang or Freeze?—Christof WETTERICH

We discuss a unified picture where both inflation and a present dynamical dark energy arise from the same scalar field. The history of the Universe describes a crossover from a ...

Jun052015

### Sloppy models, Differential geometry, and How Science Works—James SETHNA

Models of systems biology, climate change, ecosystems, and macroeconomics have parameters that are hard or impossible to measure directly. If we fit these unknown parameters, fiddling with them until they ...

May062015

### Alternatives to Cosmological Inflation—Robert BRANDENBERGER

The inflationary scenario has become the paradigm of early universe cosmology. However, inflation is not the only early universe model which can explain the current cosmological data. I will discuss ...

Mar272015

### Recent Developments in Non-Equilibrium Statistical Physics—Kirone MALLICK

Many natural systems are far from thermodynamic equilibrium and keep on exchanging matter, energy or information with their surroundings. These exchanges produce currents, or fluxes, that break time-reversal invariance. Such ...

Mar132015

### Topological tools for the real world—Jean-Luc THIFFEAULT

Topology is emerging as an important new tool for understanding our world. Computational homology, for example, has become standard for analyzing the connectivity of large-dimensional data sets. Here I present ...

Feb272015

### Polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background: Toward an Observational Proof of Cosmic Inflation—Eiichiro KOMATSU

Statistical properties of the observed fluctuations of temperature and polarisation anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background are remarkably consistent with the basic predictions of cosmic inflation driven by a single ...

Feb132015

### Pattern Formation and Collective Phenomena in Biological Systems—Erwin FREY

Reaction-diffusion dynamics endows cells with the capacity for accurate positioning, control of length, and timing of processes. Protein systems in cells employ different types of spatio-temporal patterns to ensure precise ...

Jan302015

### N=8 supergravity and beyond, or: What symmetry can teach us about quantum gravity and unification—Hermann NICOLAI

In this talk I will review at an introductory level recent developments pointing to symmetry concepts beyond (maximal) supersymmetry that may not only be relevant for the unification of particle ...